Bruce Janzhttps://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz
Department of Philosophy, University of Central Florida
Fri, 22 Feb 2019 03:03:03 +0000 en-US
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1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.1https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/cropped-logopic1-1-32x32.jpgBruce Janzhttps://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz
3232Financial Scandal at UCF – Whittaker Knew More Than He Let On, Staff Sayshttps://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/financial-scandal-at-ucf-whittaker-knew-more-than-he-let-on-staff-says/
https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/financial-scandal-at-ucf-whittaker-knew-more-than-he-let-on-staff-says/#respondFri, 22 Feb 2019 03:03:03 +0000https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/?p=1446 Staff are now testifying that the now-former president did indeed know more about the budget scandal than he let on. That the 4 people who were fired a few months ago were possibly fired... Continue reading...]]> Staff are now testifying that the now-former president did indeed know more about the budget scandal than he let on. That the 4 people who were fired a few months ago were possibly fired to divert attention from people higher up the chain. Others described the former president, Hitt, as more disengaged in his last years as president than he had been before, and so Whittaker would have been the one to know what was going on with funding.

The stories will now circulate. Fingers will be pointed. It remains to be seen whether the upper administration will figure out how to actually earn trust rather than just claiming it. Everyone, without exception, claims complete integrity for themselves.

This reminds me a bit of toxic white masculinity. Ok, a lateral move, but hear me out. In toxic white masculinity, everyone assumes and argues for complete integrity and virtue for themselves. Any problems come from other bad actors. The goal of any crisis is to reestablish the presumption of virtue, rather than examine oneself and determine whether there is more going on. One’s own intentions are all that matter, not one’s unthinking or rote obedience to a structure or presumption of virtue as a class. And, this presumption of virtue means that trust does not have to be earned from others, but is expected and it is an affront when it is not freely given. Some of this is reinforced by higher paychecks among most of these administrators, which is interpreted among those in this class of administrators as evidence of greater knowledge, higher quality, greater insight, and so forth.

What I hope for is some self-reflection not just on each person’s own intentions and actions, but on how actions were reinforced by others in the administrative class, undermined by privilege and the presumption of virtue. I hope that the finger-pointing stops, and that they consider the possibility that good people can nevertheless fall into patterns of privilege, reinforced by power and money. I see this as continuous with the general contempt for faculty, the paternalism that is rampant among administrators, the inability to understand that the frustration that they regularly feel from faculty might have some basis in the general loss of faculty governance and input, and the substitution of a corporate-style structure and a neo-liberal economic structure with the university that alienates just about everyone who isn’t in the privileged group. So the toxic white masculinity analogy, while maybe something of a stretch, does I think have some merit. I know as a white male that I’m hardly the one to speak about what it feels like to be subjected to that kind of privilege, but I’ve observed enough, read enough, and paid enough attention to know that these structures don’t necessarily have to take literal racialized or gendered lines to be replicated within an institution.

The university was always supposed to be a unique institution in society. Its self-governance, its space of inquiry and pursuit of sometimes unpopular or impractical ideas just to see where they’ll go, is essential. And the more that an increasingly large administrative class turn it into something else, the more these internal tensions are going to show themselves. We’re not a corporation, we’re not a public entity like an NGO that has a specific mission that can be easily assessed. Or, the more we’re like that, the less we’re a university.

]]>https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/financial-scandal-at-ucf-whittaker-knew-more-than-he-let-on-staff-says/feed/0Is Email Making Professors Stupid? That’s Not The Issuehttps://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/is-email-making-professors-stupid-thats-not-the-issue/
https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/is-email-making-professors-stupid-thats-not-the-issue/#respondTue, 12 Feb 2019 23:41:23 +0000https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/?p=1434Is Email Making Professors Stupid? is an article in the recent Chronicle of Higher Education. It talks about Donald Knuth, a computer scientist, who doesn’t use email and hasn’t since 1990. Instead, he has... Continue reading...]]>Is Email Making Professors Stupid? is an article in the recent Chronicle of Higher Education. It talks about Donald Knuth, a computer scientist, who doesn’t use email and hasn’t since 1990. Instead, he has a note on a website telling people to send his department regular mail, which his assistant opens and presents to him once every few months. As the article says, he prioritizes “the long-term value of uninterrupted concentration over the short-term convenience of accessibility.”

That’s lovely. I’m very happy for this Great Man, who has an assistant to do the work that’s beneath him, so he can think his Great Man thoughts. The article’s author thinks that we should all have this, and that the university has downloaded work onto faculty, thus taking their time from what they’re trained to do and requiring them to do what a support staff person could do. He thinks that it would be fairly easy to just recognize the lost labor in this arrangement, bring back support staff for faculty, and free them to Think Great Thoughts.

This is neither the world we live in nor one we could get to from here. The author here is surely correct that work has been downloaded onto faculty that was never previously their responsibility, and which distracts them from engaging in what they’re trained to do. But getting support staff back is an impossible bandaid to this problem. This writer thinks that “most departments provide some level of administrative support to professors” (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, I mean, LOLwut? I have never, ever, not once even when I was department chair had an assistant who fielded my email and made my personal faculty life easier. There was staff, but they worked on the administrative requirements of the department, as handed down by other offices in the university. They did not help me, they helped make the system work. They provide no reduction of cognitive load, nor of actual work). The writer thinks that the possible objections to having staff for each professor are twofold – first, a fear of missing something important, and second the cost. He thinks that the second problem is more significant than the first, but not insurmountable – not every professor would need a full support person, and so a smaller pool of assistants could help many professors (sorry, I’m still laughing from the earlier claim that there’s any support at all right now for anyone I know, either at my university or any other, even some at Ivy League universities that I know).

This writer is dealing with a significant issue, which is that of workload. It is too high for anyone who takes their job seriously, and it leads to lots of burnout. I’ve felt it myself. But the problem doesn’t come from insufficient support (much as I’d like someone who filled that role). It comes from a ballooning administrative class, which comes up with new procedures, new forms, new policies and requirements on a weekly basis. It comes from the attitudes of many of those administrators, who think that their new streamlined procedure is the greatest thing ever and will only require just a little form or a little input by faculty, or a little something else. It is caused by new committees giving the illusion but not the reality of faculty input into their own governance, and other committees to mentor or help or strategize or support or brainstorm or any number of other things, each of which requires just a little more from the same people. It comes from none of these administrative committees seeing any incentive to combine or rationalize anything, so the same work has to be done over and over. It comes from governments and accrediting bodies and granting agencies and all sorts of other entities making all of their hoops harder to jump through. Heck, it comes from a committee that requires that I read 1300 separate pdfs, some of which are very long, and has no way of batching all those together for a single download, so that I have to download EVERY ONE SEPARATELY. Yes, this happened to me, just last month.

So, it’s lovely the the Great Man can opt out of email. It’s also lovely that this writer can advocate that we all should have support staff. I’d love that. But unless there’s a more serious commitment to thinking about just why the economic model of the university incentivizes labor to look like this, a bandaid like a support person both will never happen, and wouldn’t fix things even if it did.

I suspect that if we did have a more equitable structure, we might see a shift in what Scientific American reported recently, which was that the diffusion of knowledge from larger or more important institutions had more impact than that from smaller ones. In other words, there may well be other Great Men (and Women) around at other institutions, but the investment put into them was not sufficient to make their influence felt. Support staff for everyone would seem to address this issue, but the feasibility of doing this, and the fact that this writer’s solution ignores the cause of the problem, means that we would still be in the same position. The Great Men and Women at important institutions would have influence, which creates its own feedback loop, whereas equally good work elsewhere would continue to be ignored.

Don Knuth is hugely important in computer science and beyond. No one who knows anything about his accomplishments would question that. But was he at Stanford because he is a Great Man, or is he a Great Man because he was at Stanford? Are there other potential Knuths out there who didn’t have his level of support, or his ability to get off of email so long ago and have someone else handle his mail and every other little thing? I think there is far more luck in this system than the merit that we all think is the only value reinforced. And that luck gets reinforced in some cases, and the lack of luck is reinforced in others.

There’s one more thing – the writer’s solution depends on recognizing the lost and misapplied labor within the existing system. That’s a good idea, but it would require something that no university I know has done – have an economic model for itself. I don’t mean a fiscal model – everyone has that. I mean a model which conceives of the university as an economic space, as a market, and thinks about how incentives work (and why they can’t just be reduced to monetary exchange), how exchange itself works, how efficiencies are generated (or are not generated), what demand looks like, what externalities look like, what form competition takes, where risk and uncertainty lie and how they are dealt with, where rent-seeking happens, and all the rest. There are universities that imagine that having units pay for services from other units within the university will generate efficiencies, but then they also have a centralized body controlling that “economy” by setting prices. It’s no wonder that labor ends up looking like it does – there are elements of a market based on competition, but not other elements, and it ends up that labor can be misaligned with its skills and its desired productivity. In other words, most universities take the worst of both the bureaucratized world and the marketplace world, and then wonder why the results are inequitable.

29 years ago today. I remember. 14 women dead, 15 injured, plus suicides reported after the massacre, directly tied to the stress of these events. I was teaching at Trent, in Peterborough, and the news of the murders in Montreal absolutely crushed everyone I knew, and me too. It’s hard to imagine today, when there are so many massacres in the US and there’s a clear public script for reactions, and they are forgotten almost as fast as they happen. We had no script back then. “Thoughts and prayers” were more like “obsessive black nightmares and crying”. We didn’t package and market the killers with brands like “incel”, which this killer surely was. Today, when this sort of thing happens, it’s almost like a TV movie – those directly affected are devastated, but the rest of the country watches it like another episode of a dystopian futurist anthology show. Like citizen-coroners, we have to learn to put it all in its place, to observe the slaughter with detached objectivity, if for no other reason than to keep our sanity intact, but also so that we could analyze the latest case and compare it to others, make them all into statistics illustrated with catchy graphics.

None of this was available in Canada in December of 1989. We had no script, we weren’t prepared. We were children. It left scars, even on those of us who only viewed it from a distance – I can only imagine what effect it had on those in Montreal that day, or those at École Polytechnique.

This was, in some sense, a turning point in the Canadian discussion about gun rights, although a contested one to this day. There is not a gun registry in Canada today – it almost happened, but a Conservative government quashed it. Canada does not have a Second Amendment, or anything like it, so the discussion over guns isn’t a discussion over fundamental rights to bear arms. Instead, it is a discussion about effectiveness of measures, and procedures, and government surveillance. And, registration and restriction of various forms of firearms had a long history in Canada, long before 1989. There are those in Canada who try to make guns into a symbol of something, but for most they continue to be viewed more like a car, that is, a tool that has its uses but can also be dangerous, and therefore needs to be controlled.

As a result, in the aftermath of the Montreal Massacre, the discussion was less about abolishing guns, and more about gender violence. The male killer made it easy for this to be the focus by explicitly separating out women, murdering only women, and making the claim that women had ruined his life. Today is National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, also known informally as White Ribbon Day. This was inaugurated by an act of Parliament in 1991. Can you imagine in the US having memorial days like this for massacres? Every day would be a memorial day. Can you imagine, further, a day of remembrance not just of this horrendous event but to think about violence against women of any sort, including domestic violence, partner violence, and all of it? To have such a remembrance would be to admit that the millions of acts of violence are not just all individual, isolated, one-off acts that have nothing to do with structure or power on larger scale, and don’t implicate all of us. What a concept.

I always remember this day, maybe because I saw the effects not far away from Montreal, at Trent. I went into the class the next morning, not sure how to handle it. It was a philosophy of religion class, 8:30 in the morning. I hardly said anything and half the room burst into tears. This was an open, raw wound, not just something that happened to someone else but not me thank God. This was something like PTSD. I didn’t turn it into a teaching moment – it was closer to something like pastoral care, without using those terms.

I think of that time every time there’s a new episode of this dystopian futurist anthology show here in the US. Every time people minimize questions of violence against women, and these days I add to that violence against blacks (yes, black lives really do matter, except not in our public discourse, and not enough to see that the constant murders are anything other than isolated events by bad apples), and violence against Muslims, and all the other sorts of violence that just don’t matter like those women’s lives mattered to everyone around me on the days after that horrible event. They mattered. It’s why we say their names, not the name of the murderer.

]]>Collaborationhttps://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/collaboration/
Sun, 11 Nov 2018 15:31:33 +0000http://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/?p=1422A Chronicle of Higher Education article on English departments, discussing among others Julie Thompson Klein and Jonathan Kramnick (and, btw, I’d love to sit in on a discussion between these two on interdisciplinarity). It... Continue reading...]]>

A Chronicle of Higher Education article on English departments, discussing among others Julie Thompson Klein and Jonathan Kramnick (and, btw, I’d love to sit in on a discussion between these two on interdisciplinarity). It is a plea for collaboration, in part, which is something foreign to most humanities scholars, but which I agree would be well worth exploring.

I’m not in an English department, but as a philosopher I recognize the impulse to want to curate cultural significance. We were the ones doing that, in the distant past, before we were moved from the center of the discussion, in ways that anticipated the story told here in this article. We were the ones who suffered from our own success – the trajectory from the division between natural philosophy and moral philosophy toward the proliferation of disciplines today, most of which see little point in engaging philosophy anymore, is one which sees philosophy trying to buttress its claim to centrality in the mission of the university. If literature thinks that it is the beating heart of the university, it is only because it learned from (stole from?) philosophy’s moral mission. And, if the authors of this piece are correct, neither literature nor philosophy are right about these self-conceptions, to the extent that they are still held.

To the extent that there is a take-away from this article, it comes at the end:

The now hackneyed talk of “silos” is one attempt to address the problem of proliferating disciplines that no longer equate with departments. This will not be solved by a reversion to core principles. Humanists have for decades engaged this issue as if it were an intellectual dilemma, as if finding just the right pitch would unify “the humanities” and clarify relations among the disciplines proper to them. It would be good, for a change, to confront the organizational problem head-on.

Scholars disagree about premises, methods, objects, and styles — it’s what we do. If we are to grapple with the university in which those perennial debates take place, however, we need a way to work together with faculty members and administrative colleagues within as well as outside our disciplines.

Cooper and Marx ask for collaboration. Is this like asking for dialogue? And is dialogue really any easier these days in the university than in the rest of society? Perhaps we don’t have the same head-on assault on reason and evidence that we do in politics and the wider culture, but we do have other tensions that make real collaboration very difficult. I know – it’s my job to try to facilitate collaboration, as a co-director of a humanities center. We’re supposed to establish projects and exploratory work not only within the arts and humanities, but beyond them. And I have to say, nothing makes me happier than when I find someone in the sciences or medical fields or other areas who is not only willing to consider that the humanities might have something to contribute to a project other than copy-editing grants and press releases, but is also willing to make their own projects more complicated by including people in the humanities who might raise questions that don’t easily fit into carefully defined categories and terms within their disciplines. These people exist, but they are few and far between.

Past the difficulty of finding collaborators in other disciplines, we also face the demands of upper administrations who structure universities to privilege the short-term over the long, the academic quarterly bottom line over the riskier investigation, the applied over the “pure” (whatever pure is supposed to mean anymore), and the productive over the creative. This is, perhaps, the real difficulty in collaboration – when the university’s infrastructure balloons with offices, procedures, accountability mechanisms, and the like, all intended by well-meaning administrators to facilitate collaboration, but which collectively make it all but impossible, we face the challenge of finding ways to construct new knowledge which does not on the one hand represent a retrenchment of the traditional discipline-bound scholar producing little-read books and articles, or on the other hand represent a trade-off of the good for the possible, as bureaucracies and grant structures come to define what counts as the advancement of knowledge (and at the same time de-incentivizes real risk-taking).

Collaboration is a great thing to talk about, but as with dialogue it is both the precursor to the production of knowledge and also an object of inquiry in itself, in the sense that its conditions are being negotiated and discovered at all times, and it is always a risk. The best collaboration is the one in which no one in the room on day one knows exactly where things will end up, because no one is going to own the concepts, the language, or the methods for engaging something. Everyone is asked to move beyond their comfort zone. I have been on projects like this – they can be exhilarating. And, they hardly ever happen, because there is usually some imperative that gets the conversation going. There’s a reason why places like the Institute for Advanced Study exists, or the Santa Fe Institute, or other places like that – some people realized that the most interesting stuff happens when you fan the flames of real collaboration, and they had the clout to make those visions a reality. This kind of collaboration is almost impossible to duplicate within existing university structures, for both structural and cultural reasons.

So, the request in the article that we “confront the organizational problem head-on” and find a way to “work together with faculty members and administrative colleagues within as well as outside our disciplines” sounds fine, as if we could just snap our fingers and make it happen. But it is on par with the requests to have a dialogue in a fractious society. Aren’t we trying that, all the time? Some are, at least. Some started out unwilling to talk to anyone but those of their own tribe, and some have come to that position, worn out from the effort. There’s no snap of the fingers that will just make all of this better. In fact, much of what English departments were concerned with throughout the 80s and 90s, in what has become derided as “theory”, was precisely the difficulty of the task of dialogue and by extension of collaboration in a world of inequality, in a world of entrenched meanings of words and practices, of politics which operated to preserve the positions of those already in power.

Cooper and Marx aren’t wrong, but their article covers the easy part, and leaves off just when the real work needs to begin. It’s all risky – some of the best people I know are people who aren’t necessarily the superstars in their fields. They have spent most of their time striving to do something unique and creative in a space essentially hostile to it. They might be recognized someday, or they might not. Or, they might lay the groundwork, and someone else might get the credit for doing something truly creative. Real collaboration is risky.

1. Advance polls are meaningless. Remember two years ago. Everyone has an advanced poll, and will claim accuracy after the fact depending on what happens. Yes, there is a science of sampling and extrapolating – and there is also lots of lying, lots of avoidance of answering polls (I do that), and lots of both wishful and ominous thinking, all designed to motivate action, either to vote or to not vote, depending on the desired outcome. Advance polls are rhetorical tools, not crystal balls. It’s best to ignore them all.

2. Everyone votes. There is almost 100% voting record in the US. As Sartre said, we are condemned to be free, so choosing to not be free is also a choice. And choosing to not vote is also a choice, which amounts to a vote. Sometimes, that vote is for “I don’t care”. Sometimes it is for “I got too busy and couldn’t get there.” Sometimes for “The status quo is fine with me.” Sometimes for “The bad stuff doesn’t directly affect me so I’m not really motivated to do anything.” And sometimes for “I don’t think my vote makes a difference anyway in this place, since its already so weighted one way or the other.” And, of course, lots of other things too.

Now of course, there are active campaigns to disenfranchise people. Some try to vote and are not allowed. These too are recorded as attempts, not in the final voting tally of course, but they add to the record of bias for a particular place. Georgia is particularly egregious, with very active campaigns to reject legitimate voters, because the Rep. candidate is also the elections commissioner (this, by the way, is something that makes people in other countries just shake their heads and wonder whether the UN should send election observers into the US to report on elections irregularities).

Anyway, the point is that even when a vote doesn’t count in one election, it adds to the understanding, and resistance, in that place. That’s unsatisfying, obviously, when extremists end up in office, but justice has short, medium, and long arcs, and all need attention. None of this means that people shouldn’t get out to the polls and vote, just that we need to ask why “non”voters don’t go to the polls. Some of these answers are easy – draconian laws designed to keep specific groups of people from the polls. Some of the answers are not so easy. While I’m not sure we could go as far as Australia and require everyone to vote, I don’t see why we couldn’t automatically register everyone to vote when they come of age, and also believe the science about how many people fraudulently attempt to vote (hardly any).

3. Even more than the 2016 election, this election shows the logical absurdity of one foundational concept of American life – the concept of individualism. We still think that the individual is some magic thing that initiates action, ideas, and everything else. We all know that there are influences in media, but it is part of the American DNA to think that the individual synthesizes all of the currents of thought, of influence, and turns them into something pure and original. We want individual freedom. We want individual choice, and somehow in the exercise of that there is supposed to be creativity, innovation, all that is good in the world. That is the key, and that’s what elections are supposed to do – be the exercise of individual freedom of choice.

This is nonsense, and it becomes more obviously nonsense every day. If we added up the individual choices of leaders in this country, we would have an entirely different array of policies and priorities than we do now. The majority agrees with the idea of universal health care, with reasonable restrictions on guns, with a number of other things. Right-wing extremism is a minority, although a sizable one. And, given the nature of fear and hate, it is an easy minority to manipulate and fan into a bonfire. Razor-thin margins of victory are not seen for what they are, but as 100% mandates for extremist politics.

In other words, individual choice does not lead anywhere, and does not synthesize and focus the world into anything significant. It is not the beginning of anything, it is a component in everything. Those who are loudly defending individual freedom are, in general, covering for a political position, and not recognizing that individual action is only one moment in the ways in which freedom is constituted. Individual choice does not cause freedom, nor is it magically unleashed in the context of freedom.

All these people who claim that they weren’t free before because of international trade agreements (“The Chinese are stealing our jobs!”), or because of immigrants (“Immigrants are stealing our jobs, and attacking us, and draining our social services!”), or because of some group or other in the US (“liberals are preventing me from praying!”), or some other boogeyman, don’t understand freedom. Or, they do understand it and are being disingenuous – it’s a political weapon to claim that you aren’t free, when in fact you just weren’t willing to make a choice. Or, when the social or economic forces that constrain you are in fact the same ones that constrain the people you think are the cause of all your woes. Or, when in fact you’re doing just fine and the claims about having no freedom are in fact just the claims a free person can make when they have time on their hands, a keyboard, and an audience.

No matter which way this election goes, it will not be a magical insight into the free will of the people. Unless, of course, we keep in mind #2 – everyone votes. But we won’t.

4. The midterm election will change nothing. I don’t mean that there will be no governmental structures that will change – they might. But we had gridlock before, and we’ll have gridlock after. If the House and the Senate changes sides, it will not stop the President’s tweets, and indeed, it may accelerate them, as part of the narrative is about grievance and threat. That would only get stronger. And if the House and Senate do not change hands, it will be taken as a mandate for more extremist action. Either way, we get more of what we’ve had before.

5. The midterm election will change everything. It is a culmination. On the right, it is the test-case for every trial balloon, every dog whistle, every presidential statement that went too far, was sorta kinda retracted but not really, was turned back on those who were outraged by the latest whatever (“No, YOU’RE the racist!”). And, they don’t have to win, just not lose badly. It will be spun as a vindication, as a reason to go even further. There is nowhere to go but deeper for the most committed to the fascist cause.

On the left, it will be mile 25 of the marathon, or it will feel like it. If results are lacklustre, will people have the energy to keep fighting, to stagger to the end? What’s the alternative? For some, there’s no choice. If you’re black, or Hispanic, or trans, or any of the above and a women, or otherwise in the cross-hairs of tweets and statements meant to put you on the other side of the divide, you have to keep going. But what about the allies? What about those who don’t feel the sting directly? Do people double down, or do they turn to their own small joys and compartmentalize everything else? We will see.

And if things do turn out well for the left? Well, probably renewed hope that the Mueller commission will be able to chip away at the crime syndicate (no, the President is not going to get impeached, not ever, but he doesn’t have to if everyone in the syndicate gets picked off and indicted, including his kids), that some House committees will change leadership and therefore their priorities (I’m looking at you, House Intelligence Committee), and that some new rules of conduct will get put in place to prevent the most egregious behaviours in the future. This is the legendary “checks and balances” of the American system that everyone hopes actually exists and is not just a fairy-tale for schoolkids.

6. Thanksgiving this year is going to be sullen and grumpy, no matter what.

]]>Social Media as One or Manyhttps://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/social-media-as-one-or-many/
Wed, 31 Oct 2018 10:53:37 +0000http://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/?p=1410Everywhere I look in the past week it seems like there’s death and sadness. The big obvious ones – innocent Jews slaughtered in Pittsburgh, a plane crash in Indonesia. Small ones – one of our... Continue reading...]]>Everywhere I look in the past week it seems like there’s death and sadness. The big obvious ones – innocent Jews slaughtered in Pittsburgh, a plane crash in Indonesia. Small ones – one of our kitchen designers told me today that two other people they worked with, husband and wife, left on a short vacation while the kitchen was finished up. They had a car crash – both lingered for awhile but passed away. And then, someone on my feed wrote a very poignant tribute to a friend of 50 years who contracted dementia 6 years ago, didn’t recognize his old friend 3 years ago, and passed away today. I know it’s been said, but it feels like winter is coming.

It is perhaps an understated problem of social media – with lots of connections comes lots of pain. And, also, lots of success and happy stories too, of course, which can also end up making one’s own life feel grey. That’s not rational, of course, but it feels like the social media screen is one thing, one unified voice which has a far more interesting life than I do, and also far more pain, and more anger, and more everything.

Perhaps we need a social media interface that represents one’s entire friends list as a crowd, with bubbles over each head, and we could get a sense that it’s not just one voice speaking, but one voice out of hundreds, and most are just carrying on, just as in the material world. Maybe too we could get those bubbles tying themselves together, or those friends in the crowd moving around, closer to some and further away from others, based on interactions and affinities.

If we saw the crowd, we might see that the balance of happiness, and also of pain and sadness, aren’t everywhere, and I wouldn’t be tempted to calibrate my mood based on that one collective voice.

]]>Against Characterhttps://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/against-character/
https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/against-character/#respondFri, 28 Sep 2018 17:55:39 +0000http://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/?p=1386A truism of political morality is that we should take character seriously. This is, perhaps, more of a truism on the right than the left, but it would be rare to find someone who would... Continue reading...]]>A truism of political morality is that we should take character seriously. This is, perhaps, more of a truism on the right than the left, but it would be rare to find someone who would say that a person’s character doesn’t matter. This is, after all, the point of hearings for prospective Supreme Court members and the point of listening to politicians as they try to convince us to vote for them.

At one level, it makes sense. We are trying to predict someone’s future actions in a role. The future is not predictable, and yet we desperately want to predict it, and more than that, control it. But to what end? To the end of putting in place what we think is right. So, we read people in order to gain some level of assurance that they will vote as we want or behave as we want.

But there’s a version of character behind this desire to predict the future. After all, we also think about character in those we are not evaluating for office. We talk about character in our friends and family. We encourage people to develop good character. By that, we might mean something more like good habits, or maybe good ways of reading and understanding the world and the people in it. If I continually see the worst in people, assume that they are up to no good, that might be an element of my character that people would take note of. My assessment of other peoples’ characters is a statement of my own character. Of course, so are my actions, and purchases, and blog posts, and jokes, and lots of other things.

That’s all what we might call the manifest content of character, the stuff that’s available to everyone that we read. But there’s also latent content that many claim to be able to read. Why is it that someone like Trump enjoys the votes of a large group of radical right-wing voters? Not because of his manifest content, but because many think that there’s latent content that outweighs the manifest content. He’s “our guy”. He’s good deep down. (This does not supplant the other major theory about his support, which is that he’s a useful idiot – it can exist alongside that more calculating and cynical theory).

The idea that there’s a latent content to character is something that the religious right has trained generations of people to believe. It is understood as “seeing as God sees.” It allows a fundamental tribal division in society, which makes possible the idea that despite manifest evidence to the contrary, Trump is a good guy, and despite manifest evidence to the contrary, Obama isn’t. Character is the state of your soul, and it is the evangelical and radical Christian conceit that they and only they can truly know that. All others have their reason as unredeemed, that is, clouded by sin, and so their reading of character cannot be trusted, nor can anything they do or say be trusted.

This belief about character has profound implications for politics and public life. Why would one care about democracy? That would be to put those who have a clouded view of character at the same level as those who don’t. Why would one support someone like Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court? Because his character is good, despite whatever he might have done as a youth. Why would one disbelieve Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s account, no matter how many details she has or how many corroborating witnesses there are? Because she does not have good character in this sense, not because of anything she said or did but because she is “liberal” and therefore tainted. This is the basis of tribalism – a decision about latent character for vast numbers of people.

It’s worth noting that, while some version of character matters no matter where one is on the political spectrum, this idea of latent character is overwhelmingly a tool of the radical right. That’s not how it is presented – I once had someone on the right say to me “well, we all have opinions”, which I knew meant that there was a superficial or manifest level of diversity of opinion, but also that the person was claiming access to the truth for herself, and that it was a test of my latent character as to whether I saw it her way or not. It was the shibboleth, the thing that showed my true nature, and I had failed that test. Despite knowing the test and having grown up with it, I was worse than unsaved, I was apostate – the worst kind of latent character defect.

This version of character has its roots in American evangelicalism and fundamentalism, but it is not primarily theological or religious. It is epistemological. In other words, it is about how knowledge is understood, verified, and scaffolded. The epistemology comes before the theology, even as it is derived from a particular version of the theology. In other words, evangelical and radical Christianity is one epistemological approach among many within Christendom to the text and the world. There have been many others over time (although, radical epistemology requires that those other ways of being Christian must be rejected). When the epistemology is actually supported among evangelicals (which is rare), it is supported through inferences and implications in religious text. The epistemology lends itself to a particular reading of text, as well as culture.

And the epistemology is a kind ersatz or perverted precursor of standpoint epistemology before feminists coined the term. Standpoint epistemology holds that there are some people (generally the marginalized, including most women) who have a better vantage point on issues of truth and falsity because they are not in false consciousness. They do not have the project of justifying a system of thinking that maintains marginalization and inequality. They have to both understand the workings of that system, in order to operate in society, and also understand its critique and other ways that society might be organized. In other words, the standpoint is not just one opinion among many, but a better epistemology because it understands the structures of knowledge and the positions of people within those structures better.

So, what is used by feminists for social justice was previously used by religious conservatives to lay claim to special knowledge. Their claim, though, does not come from having thought through the structures of marginalization and oppression in the world, but rather from a tribal epistemology which places evangelicals at the center of world history, the chosen of God, and which means that their insight is superior to that of anyone else.

There are implications to this position. It means that facts will not convince anyone to change their mind. We already knew that. It means that the emotion we saw at the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings is real – there is a sense of entitlement with this epistemology, a sense that those who hold it understand how the world really works and what’s really going on, and the forces of evil are thwarting the march toward bringing this order into reality. Youthful indiscretions are regarded as insignificant in comparison to bringing the right and good world into being. Kavanaugh’s supporters know his character, who he really is. He’s not a rapist, he’s a good man. He’s “one of us”, just as Trump is. The other tribe is just using the law and public opinion to focus on insignificant things in order to block goodness and reality coming into the world. That’s why the slogan “Make America Great Again” was so potent – we are currently in the American “Middle Ages”, between the great formation of the union and its future reconstitution in this tribal image by men of character, who are being unfairly maligned.

Another implication: this epistemology justifies all the voter suppression efforts, all the laws that take away the vote from felons in many states, all the anti-democratic moves on the right. With this epistemology, they aren’t anti-democratic, they are giving votes to only those who have the rational capacity to use them. Furthermore, this epistemology justifies a version of diversity which can leave out everyone who isn’t already in the tribe, while at the same time accusing those outside of being a monolith of thought. The diversity internal to this epistemology is not that of differences of opinion on fundamental issues, but differences of presentation and aesthetic within those issues. Meanwhile, the vast differences between various groups of feminists, or cultural differences, or other kinds of political difference can all be lumped into a single category and seen as an undifferentiated orthodoxy, because it is all outside of what this epistemology regards as the truth.

There is, though, an Achilles heel, which is that character is read at an individual level. So, it’s easy to paint groups with a broad brush as evil, but there is at least the possibility that someone might know someone who is gay, who is black, who is something other than what the definition of good character is supposed to be, and sees that they are not, after all, bad people. There is an answer to this within radical Christianity, of course – even those who seem good can really be bad – but that answer shifts character from being a form of reading individuals to being a general ideology. And at least some of those who hold this epistemology would deny that they are ideological. That’s a term for the other tribe, not their own. Many gay children have suffered grievously at the hands of hurt and angry parents, but at least some parents have been forced to re-evaluate how they think about their tribal lines because of someone close to them. Some have realized that the friend they actually like, who comes out as gay, is not a bad person at all. Sometimes the dependence of this epistemology on individualism can be answered by that very individualism. This is a bloody battle, and the most vulnerable in society pay the price, but this epistemology can be susceptible to personal connection, in ways that it is not susceptible to argument or evidence.

I am fully aware that the categories of “manifest” and “latent” character draw on Freud, and I use them deliberately to signal a connection. Freud uses these terms when he talks about dreams (among other times) to distinguish between the literal meaning of a dream and its representations which draw on the unconscious. And the version of character sketched here does the same thing. Manifest character makes narrative connections, allowing predictions of future behaviour. I judge my friends, not in the sense of negatively appraising them but in the sense of assessing what I can expect out of their action in the future based on the past. Everyone does that. That version of character is a kind of shorthand that no one could avoid.

The latent version of character, though, is another matter. It draws on an almost unassailable epistemology that tells someone who’s friend and who’s foe, who’s in and who’s out. It assumes an inner light of revelation that is easily mistaken for one’s one prejudices and desires. Jesus ends up looking exactly like the right-wing id, and is thus neutered, unable to challenge anyone’s thinking on anything. This latent version of character allows people to see that the president is in the group despite his behaviour, beliefs, and history, and it allows the president to say that there are “very fine people” among the neo-Nazis, despite their behaviour, beliefs, and history. It allows the right to tar all immigrants as rapists and criminals, while letting people who have actual raped and committed crimes off because their latent character is deemed good. Latent character is the id, the desire for domination and control, the need for anyone not in the tribe to shut up and stay in place, be meek and mild, not demand anything but produce or entertain or dance on cue. It is the affectual and emotional. It is what makes it ok for senators and the candidate at Kavanaugh’s hearing to get emotional, to cry, to rage and rail, whereas if the demeanor of Dr. Ford had cracked for a second it would have been used against her. She had to be better, stronger, and more logical than any of the white men in front of her. This is the epistemology at work – she must defend everything, even though she brings the accusation, while they get a pass from everyone with power.

This is the version of character I’m against. The kind defended by the religious radical right, the kind mediated by the inner light, which just tells us who’s in and who’s out. The kind with no accountability at all. The kind that defends frat boys for the Supreme court, or New York bullies for the presidency, because they have good hearts, while women continue to get raped and non-whites continue to be shot for anything and nothing. I’m against using character as a shorthand for all that stuff, as a way of giving some a pass but holding others to an impossible standard. This is baked into the epistemology of the evangelical and radical right and has permeated the logic of the right-wing in general. Someone might want to say that not all evangelicals are like this, and that might be true, but in order to be not like that, these rare people have some strong head-winds to deal with. And I would want to see actual resistance to the epistemology within evangelical circles on the part of the person claiming this. Don’t tell me about what you’ve done, you evangelicals, tell those of your tribe who hold this anti-Christian, evangelical epistemology. My guess is, that person won’t be evangelical for long. That person will find that others will regard them as suspect, as part of the other tribe, and push them out. That’s how the epistemology works.

This will sound like a rejection of theology or faith, but it isn’t. Evangelicalism is not equipped to tell the difference between epistemology and these things. It has shielded itself from critical thought (in most Bible colleges the closest anyone will get to critical reasoning will be an apologetics course, which is far from the same thing), just as it has carefully shielded itself from any ability to think about history (just check any evangelical book store if you don’t believe me, or for that matter the curriculum of any evangelical Bible college). I have not sketched out the epistemology fully here, but it drives the logic of the right, not just inside religious circles but outside as well, and renders it immune from critique, except for the already noted Achilles heel.

So, I give up on character as an idea useful for very much of anything. It is too tainted. I am apt to think that there’s lazy thinking, covering up privilege, or worse, when someone advocates that character is important. I’d rather do the harder work of listening and looking, and I’d rather people did that to me as well.

NYT coverage of the primary elections in Florida and Arizona. It’s been noted before, but there’s a subtle (sometimes not so subtle) slant to their political reporting. Exhibit A:

“Mr. Gillum edged out Ms. Graham, a former North Florida congresswoman who finished second, and Mr. Levine, the former Miami Beach mayor who finished third, after dropping nearly $30 million of his personal fortune into the campaign. Ms. Graham, a moderate, had been considered the favorite in a midterm year in which many Democratic women have fared well.

But her centrism and the implicit case for electability proved to be of little asset in a year when emotions have gripped both parties.”

It’s the last sentence here that made me double-take. Voting for Gillum is evidence that emotions have gripped both parties? Voting for the black guy who wants universal health care, thinks marijuana isn’t the big threat it’s made out to be, and wants fewer black people shot – that’s the position that someone who’s driven by emotion rather than reason would want?

The real issue is this, and it’s a very old one. Do you vote for the positions you want, or do you vote strategically? To someone who is voting based on how they think others will vote, that is, voting on who they think can be elected, then voting for the person who the media has decided is the most “extreme” looks like an irrational vote.

There are several problems here, though. First, who decided on who is most extreme and who isn’t? It’s like there is a single-line continuum in American politics, and everyone can be placed on it. Isn’t it possible, though, for someone to be “extreme” in one way and not in others? Is there an algorithm, in which you put a candidate’s positions and it gives you their point on the line? Second, why is it the most rational thing to do, to project yourself into the future and into the public sphere to determine who is “electable”? It assumes that we can occupy two positions – our own position in which we vote for what we want, and the position over and above the whole process, in which we can somehow figure out how this complex system is going to work when everyone else does what they’re going to do. It’s like trying to predict the stock market – would be great if you could, but the fact is, no one can, and anyone who says they can or thinks they can is full of it.

I voted for Gillum. Was that based on emotion? Well, I didn’t vote for him because I hate the president and all that he stands for. That didn’t come into my calculation. This was a primary – 5 Democratic candidates against each other, to decide who goes against the Republican in the November election. I did vote based on the platform, which I think is, in fact, the most rational platform, given all the evidence we have of what succeeds, what is most efficient and cost-effective, and what is most humane to the largest number of people, both in this country and in others. None of this is about emotion.

I voted for him because he’s a mayor (there were two mayors in this race). I’d be happy for most of the country to be run by former mayors. They’re the ones who see the problems on the ground. They’re the ones who have to face the poor people on their doorstep. These problems are not abstractions to them. They’re the ones who, if they’re any good, still have to have a heart. It’s not all lofty rhetoric and empty promises. There are risks for mayors too – they’re probably more susceptible to small-time influence, to people coming with quick fixes and flashy opportunities. The good ones have to tell the difference between long-term development and short-term headlines for their cities.

I voted for him also because he’s black. Why is that a qualification? In itself, it isn’t, but it tells me about some of the communities he’s seen growing up. I don’t actually know whether he grew up rich or poor, but it’s virtually certain that he grew up seeing systemic injustice in the country. There’s a high degree of likelihood that he understands the difference between personal virtue (and I hope he has that too) and systemic problems. I don’t know his past or his family at all, but I think there’s hardly a black person in this country who wouldn’t understand that difference. So, that’s not so much a qualification as a much-needed perspective. I had little faith that the more “rational” candidates – political insiders, land developers, rich people – really understood that.

So, was I swept up by emotion in voting for Gillum? I don’t think so. I wasn’t triangulating as to who could beat his opponent in November, the Trump-approved Ron DeSantis. I wasn’t thinking that a more moderate person would somehow sway swing voters. I was thinking, who would be best for this state? That seems rational to me.

]]>https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/irrational-voting/feed/0Doing and Teachinghttps://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/doing-and-teaching/
https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/doing-and-teaching/#respondTue, 28 Aug 2018 11:46:39 +0000http://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/?p=1363https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/opinion/sunday/college-professors-experts-advice.html What makes a good teacher, from a student’s point of view? The author here makes some fairly broad generalizations about researchers and teachers. He feels a bit like he cherry-picks examples to prove... Continue reading...]]>

What makes a good teacher, from a student’s point of view? The author here makes some fairly broad generalizations about researchers and teachers. He feels a bit like he cherry-picks examples to prove his point. Are new people always better teachers than older researchers? Are experts worse than non-experts? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I’ve seen both. But that’s not the real issue, I think.

The fundamental problem in the article is that it separates doing from teaching. I can understand why it does this – there’s a 2500 year old tension between philosophy and rhetoric that more or less maps on to doing and teaching. Philosophy is about finding truth and rhetoric is about expressing it. And so the tension is, which comes first, which is more important? That discussion has gone on in different forms for a long time, and exists today.

The problem with it is that I’m not sure the world sorts out so well into these two things. The examples used in the article are in science – there’s doing science and there’s talking about it. Seems like an obvious distinction. And yet, the talking extends to all of it. The problem is in not being able to shift communities and audiences. Scientists still communicate in doing science – with colleagues, with grad students in their labs, with their wider community. It’s just that there is a shared body of knowledge, with its shortcut and summarizing terminology, that everyone is enculturated into, that accelerates communication in that area.

Students, especially new ones, don’t have that. They aren’t in the in group, and they have to get there. So, they have to find a way in. A good teacher is one who knows how to unpack the specialist vocabulary, assumptions, etc., but who also knows how to express the driving and motivating questions in an area without using that specialist vocabulary. And this, I think, doesn’t necessarily map onto whether you’re a newly minted PhD or have been at it a long time.

Things become even more fuzzy in areas where it’s not clear what the difference between doing and teaching is. The model of teaching in this article is something like the classroom lecture. That is an older view of what actually happens in teaching today. There are so many models of teaching that don’t primarily depend on the person who knows explaining things to the people who don’t know.

It’s not just that the model of teaching is wrong, it’s that the epistemology is wrong. In other words, it assumes that knowledge is a thing transferred from one person to another, and installed in their minds. What if it isn’t like that? What if the knowledge comes from others in the room as well? What if it’s more like helping students to ask a good question, one which not only sheds light on some phenomenon but which catches them up, stays with them and goes on to inform their way of understanding the world? None of this means that there aren’t facts to be learned about any area, but that might not be where good teaching lies at all.

In class sometimes, I tell students about my “rubber meets road” question – who cares? Who cares about the stuff I’m talking about. It usually gets a wry chuckle, not quite a laugh, but students recognize that it is, after all, their real question about most of what they’re hearing in most classes. It’s especially strange for a philosopher to ask – shouldn’t we revel in the arcane minutiae of the world, the stuff that no one could possibly care about? Isn’t our knowledge by definition esoteric and, to the vast majority, useless? Nope. That’s the view someone might hold who wasn’t ever in a really good philosophy class.

My answer to the “who cares” question takes a couple of forms, depending on what we’re talking about. One answer is, “well, these people, living at this time or place, cared, and here’s why. Here’s their world, here’s their way of putting things together and seeing why they cared about some particular thing gives you a window on a world unlike ours in many ways.” That answer is one I use a lot in both history of philosophy and in cultural philosophy, because both stand at a distance from most students. It’s the first half of the old anthropological goal, which is to make the unfamiliar into the familiar, and the familiar into the unfamiliar.

Another answer is the second half. We start from something that students think they know, and we make it foreign. This is Socrates’ move. That concept you think you know? Well, it’s way more complicated than you think. You’re taking a lot for granted. It has multiple meanings and senses, especially to different groups of people, and you’re just thinking of one use. Once you realize all that, we can begin. The familiar becomes the unfamiliar.

Now, neither of these are about transferring information from one person to another. And, neither of these are something that can exist only in a particular group of people. Highly skilled and successful researchers can do this. Grad students can do this. Students can do this for each other in learning teams in class.

The article is, I know, supposed to be advice for students. How should you pick your professors? And yet, I wonder if it is very useful advice. The author is trying to map teaching on to things like research success, age, and other things. I’m almost surprised he didn’t stray into the territory of “avoid the professor with the funny foreign accent”. None of these really correlate to good teaching, and so aren’t likely to be much of a guide for students. What might be a good guide? Well, other students, but by that I don’t mean something like Rate My Professors. Sites like that only attract people with a strong feeling about something. It’s even less useful than voluntary student evaluations of a class – only the ones with something on the tips of their tongues are going to respond.

No, the students I have in mind are the ones who have done well in an area. The author of the article gets this right – the people who had to actually learn something, rather than the people who are “naturals” at it. It might be hard to tell the difference at first glance, but here’s a tip: those who are actually excited about an area, who talk about it, who explore it on their own and connect it to other things, even in other classes, those who do more than the minimum, are probably the ones who recently were turned on to an area, and who were well taught. That’s who I’d ask.

A report in the Atlantic tracks the decline of the humanities since the financial crisis of 2008. The decline is both in the number of students in classes and the number of majors.... Continue reading...]]>

A report in the Atlantic tracks the decline of the humanities since the financial crisis of 2008. The decline is both in the number of students in classes and the number of majors. We’ve heard reports of this sort many times over the past few years. To its credit, this article resists going for the usual uninformative reasons for this, which tend to revolve around blaming the victim.

What seems clear here is that a large part of the decline can be attributed to people trying to calibrate their chances in the job market, and going for what they think will be the best bet upon graduation. This article shows very well that this is about perception, not reality – the stats fail to show that humanities is any less effective at preparing people for jobs, or even for getting them jobs. The decline does not seem to say anything about what students actually want to take, but rather what they think they should take in order to raise the chances of employment. One quote:

“So does the crisis in the humanities actually reflect a shift in what students want to select as a major, or is it just a change in what they think they should choose as a major? Suppose college tuition was free and every first-year had a guaranteed job lined up for after graduation. This parallel universe does exist at military-service academies—and at West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs, humanities majors are at about the same level as they were in 2008.”

As advocates for the humanities have said for a long time, it is an illusion that most STEM areas or seemingly more practical areas in the university lead to reliable or high-paying jobs at a greater rate than the humanities. The statistics don’t bear it out. Other factors, as the article shows, have far more bearing on likelihood of employment than whether one majored in history or in computer science. And, it is not the case that interest in questions that the humanities deal with is waning. It is not that we no longer care about questions of history or thought or meaning. It is that we think we can handle these questions ourselves, whereas we cannot handle the issue of getting a decent job ourselves. Being a good citizen or finding meaning seems like something we can will into being, whereas no amount of will, in this age, will produce a job. The American Dream has truly died, for that’s what it was – the belief that our own will, and all that comes with it, is sufficient to produce a materially good life. You have to go to somewhere like Canada if you still want that dream.

We might think, then, that the problem is just one of marketing. We aren’t getting the message out. People aren’t understanding that, if their goal is to get a decent job, the humanities are as good a bet as anything else. And that might be true. I know my college has, in recent years, paid far more attention to marketing, and we’ll see what dividends that pays.

I’m more interested in how this phenomenon might relate to other social phenomena. The financial crash that started in 2008 is a pivotal point. What the desire on the part of students to calibrate their chances in the job market says to me is that there is a different kind of uncertainty out there than most people experienced previously in their lives. It is not unprecedented in history, of course – we went through the Great Depression and world wars. But those are the memories of a previous generation, and they found their ways to adapt to those uncertainties.

What else is happening at that time? We also have the beginning of Obama’s presidency. We also have the rise of the Tea Party and other forms of what we now call the alt-right, which has reached its apotheosis with the current president and his followers. Obama campaigned on hope, but undermined that hope in the perceived response to the financial crisis of 2008. It was the perception of his response (at least, as far as the bailouts were concerned), because much of the bailout money was paid back, and he may well have been right that there was no other option to halt the slide of the economy. It was halted, though, only for some (only the already wealthy), and it continued for many others. And, there was no symbolic response – no bankers put in jail, no collective moral statement about the causes of the crash, at the highest level of government.

So, it is no surprise that we can mark the turn towards individuals calibrating their chances in the job market to that date. Not to say that it didn’t happen before – I recall being in grad school, at the Master’s level, and wondering whether I should go on for a Ph.D. or whether I should go to law school. The second option was, after all, more secure, right? (well, not really, but that was my perception at the time). But as I thought about the kind of law I would want to do, it would have been legal theory and international law. In other words, the parts of law that look the most like philosophy. And so I realized that I really wanted to do philosophy, and I should stop kidding myself and just do it. But there was that uncertainty, and the impulse to calibrate my education to the jobs I thought were out there.

The followers of the current president are, I think, screaming at the world that this uncertainty exists, and that it is traceable back to the mis-handled crisis of 2008. The fact that people can stay so devoted, even after all the revelations about criminality around the president, even after all the moral questions and the policy outrages, says that there is a stronger force keeping them there. It is usually understood as a kind of certainty in a moral order that they think the president is going to restore, an order that will bring white male Americans back to their central place in society. And, of course, many (including me) will point out that they never lost that place, but that’s beside the point, because this is about how people feel, not what reality is. And so there are ridiculously oversimplified solutions to perceived problems – walls against immigrants, guns everywhere, exploitation of all land for commerce, and the rest – which give a sense that the uncertainty of the world can be controlled. At the same time, there is a sense that one’s inner sense of meaning really is paramount, and admitting that we live in a society of difference rather than one that has some imagined core which has its best representation in the lives, loves, and appetites of white men is too difficult and a moral affront. Clarity is what is needed in an uncertain age.

But it is clarity that we can only have in hindsight, not in foresight. We tell the Whiggish stories about the triumphs of the great and the good, but these are all after the fact. We want to reduce uncertainty, to live in certainty (that is, after all, what evangelicalism offers, and what makes it immune to discussion with anything different from itself). That is what students want when they calibrate their chances in the job market – what will give me certainty, or the closest thing to it? That is what the followers of the president want – easy answers to complex problems, the end of uncertainty.

The fact that students are looking away from the humanities is, in other words, more than just a marketing problem. We know the stats and the facts – the humanities are not, in fact, a substantially worse bet for finding jobs. Other factors figure much more significantly; there is a prevailing illusion to those areas that are perceived as guaranteed to provide jobs; the jobs that seem to have guarantees might not be the jobs that people really want to be in, judging from the attrition rates in some of those areas. But countering those misperceptions will only take us part of the way, because it doesn’t deal with an underlying truth. That is this: the crash shook this generation to its core, perhaps even more than what happened on Sept. 11, 2001. Or, the events of 9/11 set the moral and existential reality of uncertainty before us, which the crash of 2008 drove home at a personal level.

The question, then, is this: how does one deal with uncertainty? There are several options. You can try to diminish it, by setting some preconditions that diminish and shape the noise of the world (that’s the evangelical answer). You can try to control it, even dominate it (a common response, one that can be seen in the idea that you can create your reality). You can try to ride it by placing your best bet on what seems like a sure thing (that’s the economist’s answer, and in a way what students are doing by betting on a discipline to provide a job whether or not that’s what they really want to study). Or you can try to respond to it more quickly and more flexibly, recognizing that we can’t entirely prepare in advance for the unexpected, but we can develop the intellectual and practical skills to react to change.

The humanities don’t have a monopoly on flexibility, but that is what they train people for. The problem is, flexibility is hard to measure and hard to give credit to. We hear from the famous people in business, and those with a humanities background often tell us how important that was for their success. And no one, it seems, takes that seriously. Why? Because what was important about it is often unquantifiable. It is the ability to face uncertainty and creatively respond to it. Assessment mechanisms can’t pick that up, because assessment is based on a continued pattern of improvement in a particular direction.

The real challenge for the humanities, in other words seems to me to be that its greatest strength is also its hardest quality to describe or promote. And yet, in a world more uncertain than ever, in the aftermath of the crash of 2008, its greatest strength is more needed than ever. The loudest people out there are the ones who claim to have answers, but they are rarely the ones honest enough to admit that uncertainty can’t be controlled, can’t be wished away through magical thinking, and can’t be bargained with. It can only be responded to creatively. The education needed is in that creative type of response, the ability to adapt and think through things again and again.

]]>https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/more-humanities-and-more-crisis/feed/0Another proposal to save the humanities (that won’t work)https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/another-proposal-to-save-the-humanities-that-wont-work/
https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/another-proposal-to-save-the-humanities-that-wont-work/#respondWed, 08 Aug 2018 11:59:11 +0000http://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/?p=1353I’m generally not a huge fan of Ross Douthat, but I don’t dismiss him on principle the way I do some other columnists. When he talks about the humanities, though, he makes me want to... Continue reading...]]>I’m generally not a huge fan of Ross Douthat, but I don’t dismiss him on principle the way I do some other columnists. When he talks about the humanities, though, he makes me want to throw things at my computer screen. Today’s sober analysis (Oh, the Humanities) gave me some brief hope before crushing it at the end. He rightly notes the recent data showing the decline of the humanities (which really means the decline in the number of students willing to declare a humanities major). This extends to the social sciences closest to the humanities as well. To my surprise, he does not rush immediately to the usual conservative explanations for this decline – postmodernism and activism. He sees these as failed attempts to meet earlier declines in the humanities (I don’t agree, but at least he’s not giving us the same old tired, easy, and wrong political justification for rejecting analysis that involves class, race, gender, and other nonreductionist ways of thinking about being human).

But then he gives us his solution to the decline of the humanities:

But a hopeful road map to humanism’s recovery might include variations on those older themes. First, a return of serious academic interest in the possible (I would say likely) truth of religious claims. Second, a regained sense of history as a repository of wisdom and example rather than just a litany of crimes and wrongthink. Finally, a cultural recoil from the tyranny of the digital and the virtual and the Very Online, today’s version of the technocratic, technological, potentially totalitarian Machine that Jacobs’s Christian humanists opposed.

Yeah, I don’t think so. The “Jacobs” here, by the way, is Alan Jacobs, author of a new book, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in An Age of Crisis. It is Douthat’s favorite kind of book – one which returns to a particular kind of Anglo-Catholic mid-century quasi-mysticism. It is humanities as the intellectual bulwark against the meaninglessness of technocratic society. If only we all submitted ourselves to the mysteries of the faith, were seduced by the smells and bells, we would be able to resist the corrosive effects of technology, hyper-individualism, and commerce. Universities should be teaching us that – the best of what has been thought and said, as Matthew Arnold put it. I was surprised in Jacobs’ book to not see more of the Inklings included, but those he does look at are Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil. Come on, at least J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. And, oh yes, I know that in Jacobs’ list only two of the figures are English by birth, although Eliot really really wished he was. Still, the sensibility here is Anglo-Catholicism.

Anyway, that was a (post)war answer that Douthat wants to recover for a completely different time. I think it gave a lot of comfort after the insanity of war, but we have a different insanity today. He wants three things here. First, a serious academic interest in the truth of religious claims. You know, I think he’s not paying attention, because this does exist, just not the way he wants. He doesn’t mean religious, he means Christian, and he doesn’t mean just any Christian, he means a particular version of Christian. The up-side, perhaps, is that it is less obviously toxic compared to the version dominant in the US today – I will take some smells and bells over neo-fascism carrying a cross any day – but the thing is, it’s still an abdication of hard thinking about the world and its real material problems. The solution to injustice ends up being woolly and ineffective, and really does end up looking like the opiate of the masses. There is the study of religion today in the university, but not the study of theology except in specific places, and that too is in decline. Will a return to the study of religious claims save the humanities? I highly doubt it. Will the return to thinking about meaning within all areas of life, and reclaiming all forms of study as humanities areas, save the humanities? Hard to say, but I think it has a better chance.

His second recommendation is to have a “regained sense of history”, by which he means history as “repository and example”, not as all the things we did wrong. So, either a triumphalist history, in other words (what great things did we do in the past to make us so great today?) or a narrative of decline (how have the great things of the past been thwarted and perverted to leave us in the mess we are in now?). I know, both of these are unduly tendentious. Are they, though? Isn’t this what it amounts to, this call to basically whitewash the past? Doesn’t this just tell those who continue to suffer from structural problems in society that it’s their own fault, or it’s just the way things are, or its the metaphysical order of things for some to be greater and others to be lesser?

The third recommendation: a “cultural recoil from the tyranny of the digital and the virtual and the Very Online”. Hmm. I do wish he had circulated this column by mimeographed pamphlet instead of on the New York Times website, but be that as it may, I do wonder about the analysis of technology here as the thing that corrodes humanity. This was a popular idea throughout much of the 20th century – besides the figures in Jacobs’ book, we could look to Jacques Ellul, Heidegger, Marcuse, and a long list of others, at least some of whom would not share the religious underpinnings of the suspicion towards technology – but I’m not sure it’s such an easy position today. It is not just that we’re post-human cyborgs (although we are), that is, totally continuous with our technology at this point, so that it is hard to tell the difference, it is that the mid-century mysticism of the figures Douthat and Jacobs assumes that there is a separable core of humanness that is unaffected by the flows of technology (and for that matter, everything else – environment, commerce, etc.) and which has its rightful place when it dominates and controls those other things. It is no accident that most of the figures Douthat admires are British – the legacy of empire dies hard for the British, especially after the war, and it was a legacy of reason and character (read: the Christian virtues) rising above the chaos of the world and putting it in order (read: the colonies). It is a yearning for those good old days when the world was simple and everyone knew their place.

It’s not that world, and the fact is, it never was that world. The mid-century quasi-mysticism of the British intellectual elite was a response to forces of social and technological change that no longer fit into a nicely ordered world where the lower classes knew their place. It’s worth wondering whether, after the current age of activism in the face of rising irrationality in the world, when people are worn out with the struggle, if there will again be a retreat into quasi-mysticism as a personal justification of one’s own rightness. Douthat might get what he wants, if the November elections don’t give the US the “blue wave” that many are hoping for, and if in Britain there ends up being a hard Brexit rather than a soft one.

But this was all about the way to save the humanities. If Douthat’s solution is untenable, and I think it is, is there anything better? Sure, but there’s no easy fix. Douthat focused on what he sees as a retreat from meaning in the humanities. That’s what all three of his recommendations amount to. It is possible to address questions of meaning without a retreat to quasi-mysticism. It is possible, for instance, to bring the humanities into the rest of the university. I have always argued that all disciplines are humanities disciplines, because all disciplines at some point or at some level are concerned about how knowledge connects with human life, and how human life connects with the cycles and networks of non-human existence and emergence. I’m less interested in recovering some “true meaning of the human”, if that means finding some universal and eternal truths about being human (those don’t have a great track record when it comes to justice, freedom, equality and other things, even when we talk explicitly about them), and more interested in what comes next, what is created from the here and now, what it means even in dark times to find a new way of being human. And we have examples of this, all over the world. They show up in places of oppression and neglect.

Douthat’s humanism has no humans in it, no real ones at least. It has idealized ones, ones that never change, ones that exist in Eliot’s abstractions about time or Lewis’s myths, not humans that live in this world. And this, perhaps, is the real battle over the humanities – should it be following Arnold in looking at the best of what is thought and said, or should it be looking at real humans? Or, if both, what should the balance be? Douthat is clearly an Arnoldian, I am not. Douthat thinks the humanities need recovery, I think they need reinvention and new connections to every other area of thought.

]]>https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/another-proposal-to-save-the-humanities-that-wont-work/feed/0NY Times Election Map from 2016: The Problem With Data Visualizationshttps://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/ny-times-election-map-from-2016-the-problem-with-data-visualizations/
https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/ny-times-election-map-from-2016-the-problem-with-data-visualizations/#respondThu, 26 Jul 2018 15:10:12 +0000http://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/?p=1349https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/upshot/election-2016-voting-precinct-maps.html The NY Times publishes a voting map of the US for the 2016 presidential election, showing how areas voted down to the polling station level. So, if you’re American you can see how... Continue reading...]]>

The NY Times publishes a voting map of the US for the 2016 presidential election, showing how areas voted down to the polling station level. So, if you’re American you can see how much of a bubble you’re in.

Interesting and useful, although I always have a problem with these geographic data visualizations, in that geography does not correlate with population, and doesn’t tell you all sorts of other things. So, this map looks predominantly red, even though by population the Democrats had more votes. This map does not reflect one very large bloc – the eligible non-voters. It does not reflect those who were scrubbed from voter roles for whatever reason, or who were unregistered, or who were otherwise ineligible due to having a felony on their records, or various other things.

This map does not reflect a lot of other stuff also. So, yes, interesting, but one should not draw too many conclusions based on the visuals. The temptation (yes, I did it too) is to zoom in on one’s own neighborhood and see where things ended up, and then start to wonder which of one’s neighbors are playing for the other team. Of course, if one is in a bubble, that doesn’t really matter much, but I am in a less bubbly area. Do we talk to these neighbors, or do we close our blinds more tightly, hide the lawn signs, and retreat even more to protective spaces?

The ideal, from another age and place, is that we come together, talk through our differences, and come to a shared sense of purpose. Yeah, right. Who believes that anymore? Everyone believes their own side to be reasonable and open to discussion, and the other side to be a brick wall of arrogance, stupidity, and self-interest. And if that version of dialogue doesn’t work anymore because its preconditions don’t exist, a map like this is more like reconnaissance, to know how deep one is in enemy territory. And if one is far from enemy territory all the better, right?

I think we need another kind of data vis. This is meant to reflect reality, but like I say, lots of relevant reality is left out. I don’t really think the goal is dialogue anymore, at least not as we have known it. It’s been weaponized, and the idea that it is or should be based on facts seems a quaint idea from another time. So, a visualization, inasmuch as it is meant to present facts about the world, will not lead to any useful dialogue. It will just be fake news to those who don’t like some aspect of it, and since any visualization is a set of choices, there will always be something to complain about. I did it, just a few paragraphs ago. And the partiality will be interpreted as falsehood.

But what else can be done, that could make anything better? Part of the problem is that visualizations also have to come with the ability to critique them. It’s fine if something is partial, if we have the literacy to recognize that and take it for what it’s worth. It’s not an all or nothing thing. The NY Times map is useful as far as it goes, but it’s fairly clear where its usefulness stops. But if one starts with the conclusion, with the belief that you are convinced is the case, and then go looking for whatever supports that or doesn’t, those nuances are lost, and the need for visual and data literacy goes away. Nuance is not needed, seeing something as partially useful but having limits is beside the point.

That is the situation in war, and that’s what we’re in right now. There aren’t armies walking through the streets (although, some will say, the police assault on black people comes close). There is, though, the mindset of war – the irrational battle needs to be fought first, before we think about nuance.

The issue, then, is not how we prevent war. We’re in one now, in all but literal partisan deaths (and again, some might already want to identify some deaths as the first ones in this conflict). The real issue is how wars wind down, not how we avoid them. The US, unfortunately, is not very good at winding down wars. They carry on for years, even decades. There is no moment at which people say, the killing is no longer worth it, we must find another way. In the US, the tendency is rather to regroup, retool, and try another route. On this logic, the US Civil War never really ended, it just took on more subtle strategies in the decades after, up to the present day. The wars on terror and on drugs never ended.

I don’t think a new data visualization will get us any closer to thinking about this question, but I do think we need to shift to asking about how wars end. If one’s answer is “well, it’s obvious, it’s over when we win!” the point has been missed. What’s winning? Just a moment on the path, just a reason to change tactics. There have been wars, elsewhere, that have actually ended. Lots of them. But the US, at least in recent years, is rarely part of those. The imperative of war in Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” is the material reason for its continuance, sure, but I’m more interested in the reasoning and the changes of mind that ended wars elsewhere. As always, the US has much to learn from the rest of the world, and as always, it probably will not be open to learning it, but that’s what has to be learned. What, other than “winning”, moves us to ending a war?

]]>https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/ny-times-election-map-from-2016-the-problem-with-data-visualizations/feed/0Trust and Faithhttps://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/trust-and-faith/
https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/trust-and-faith/#respondSat, 14 Jul 2018 15:37:33 +0000http://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/?p=1342My university is getting a new president, after 26 years of the previous one being in that position. The new president was our provost (there was a national search, but it’s pretty clear that he... Continue reading...]]>My university is getting a new president, after 26 years of the previous one being in that position. The new president was our provost (there was a national search, but it’s pretty clear that he was the odds-on favorite from the beginning). What I’m interested in is not whether he was the best choice or not (I was on sabbatical this year, and so not involved in any way with the selection or public events during the interview process). I’m interested in the move from the provost filling a role at the university, to being something more than a role. And we can see that in his wife, or rather, in the fact that his wife is now seen as relevant, whereas when he was provost, she was not relevant to his job.

Why would that be? With the previous president, it was “John and Martha” think this, do that, etc. Now, we see “Dale and Mary”. We see it in other areas also. With normal presidents of the United States (i.e., not the current one), there is also a sense that the first lady is relevant. And, with our university president, we see the wife of the president called the “first lady” sometimes. None of this is meant to question the contribution of women to what are predominantly male leaders – perhaps the real question is, why is it relevant now and not at other times, in other positions? Why do we not know about the wife of the provost, or of deans, or department chairs? Do they not contribute also? And how about when those roles are filled by women – why do we not hear about the man behind the woman? We heard about Margaret Thatcher’s husband Denis once in awhile, but he was hardly prominent. Drew Faust Gilpin, past president of Harvard, has a husband (Charles Rosenberg) who is rarely mentioned.

But this is not about the secondary status of women, which is surely true and exhibited every day. My question here is, why do we shift into this narrative for people at the top of an organization or a government? I suspect it is because we are trying to leverage a narrative, and trying to create trust. These are large, complex organizations. No one can know every bit of them. We must have some level of trust in the person at the top. If we cannot rely on our own ability to understand something, we have to trust someone who does.

Now, you might think that going through an interview and selection process would be enough to assure people of that. You might think that an election would be enough. But it isn’t. The person needs to not only be selected, but seem worthy. And seeming worthy requires leveraging a narrative, one of family structure, in which the leader is dad. And dad needs a mom, in the heteronormative public imagination. If dad can show that there is an orderly and loving family, he can be magnanimous and acknowledge their support, while he gets from them the legitimacy of being a male leader. We saw this as well recently with Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court in the US, Brett Kavanaugh, who made a point of having his well-scrubbed family with him on stage, to underscore the narrative.

There is, as George Lakoff has often said, a political divide on this. The right wants the stern father, the left wants the nurturing mother. But that doesn’t entirely cover it. The issue is about trust – why it is needed and how it is generated. We trust someone when the networks or structures we need to deal with are too complex for us to understand. And, that is an inevitable fact of life – these always exist, which is why we generate mechanisms for trust – expertise, testimonials, track records of success in some area. The more there is a sense that an area is too complex to understand, the more we search for someone to trust.

But is it actually trust? It might be faith. Trust is different from faith. Trust has mechanisms. We can trust but verify. We can have trust based on past performance, and withdraw trust based on the same thing. Faith, on the other hand, tends to be an all or nothing affair. It is a narrative we tell that fits the parts of the world together into a coherent whole.

Universities need to have their constituent communities trust the leadership. Why? Because they are very complex entities, with very large budgets. No one can fully understand all their workings (partly because the mechanisms are often local ones, and often dependent on tradition rather than rational structure). But there’s another reason. In a university, if everyone just did their job as it is spelled out in their contracts, the university would grind to a halt quickly. Universities depend on people doing more than the basics. They depend on people working far more than a 40 hour week. And, the only way they can get this kind of commitment is to not think of university space as a job, but as a calling, more like a religious vocation, which people believe in. And, the symbol of that belief is the president. And his wife. This is more like faith than it is like trust.

And so, the fundamental political distinction that Lakoff identifies, between types of metaphor, doesn’t quite capture it. I think what does capture the distinction is the difference between trust and faith. The left looks for something or someone to trust, whereas the right looks for something or someone to have faith in, at least in this day and age. That’s not necessarily the case at all times, but is it the case now. On the left, in an ideal world we would not have to trust anything but reason and the mechanisms we have put into place for allowing rational beliefs and options to win the day. On the right, in an ideal world, we would have faith in the narrative about the US and the story told by right-wing politicians, which is a story of hierarchy and the centrality of white men to all things. This is faith, not trust, because if we were to use the mechanisms of trust to evaluate these claims, they would not stand.

Bringing the supportive wife into the picture is a story about faith, not trust, especially under Republican presidents. Consider the last two Democratic presidents. Both had wives, and both did not easily fit into the “faith” model. Both Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama were forceful. They were not the meek and supportive figure, enabling a narrative of faith. They did, however, operate in the realm of trust. George W. Bush’s wife Laura, and his father’s wife Barbara, both fit into the supportive spouse role, at least while they were in office.

How, then, does one deal with faith? It is regarded as such an unalloyed good in American culture that it is hard to see what the alternative might be. Well, one thing to realize is that trust is incremental whereas faith is catastrophic. In other words, change happens with trust bit by bit, and can go both directions, towards more or less trust. Change in faith only happens by overturning a narrative and replacing it with another. So, it seems impossible to deal with – contrary evidence to a narrative of faith is more likely to get people to dig in to the narrative than to overturn it.

And yet, there are still elements of trust even in those who operate by faith. There is still the ground-up logic of weighing the evidence of your eyes, at least on some things. The problem, though, has to do with how we deal with the very complex, very difficult to understand structures of the world. The narrative around Donald Trump is totally one of faith, among his followers. Many would vote for him no matter what evidence is brought forward about anything he has done. Some will commit violent acts if he is impeached; some might even if he is voted out of office. The faith is strong in this Daddy and his rich friends (and, in his case, his cabinet almost fills the role of wife in supporting the faith, since it is about success and its markers). In many cases, there is no way to change this faith, nor should anyone try.

But trust can change. Right now, enough people trust Trump because he’s doing what he said he would do – put extreme right-wing judges in place, not only in the Supreme Court but elsewhere as well. Stand up to what his base perceives as bullying by other nations. Evict undocumented people and ramp up harassment of minorities. And, even if these things are put to a halt by, say, an election in November that gives Democrats control of the House and Senate, this won’t diminish peoples’ trust, and it will certainly not change their faith. Indeed, one of the arguments of the right is that we have placed too much trust in technocrats, the experts of governance and public policy. Faith Trumps trust, the top-down narrative trumps the bottom-up process of externalizing our cognitive processes to reliable alternatives.

A university, in giving a “president + wife” narrative, is trying to establish faith. It has other ways of doing this – its football team, for instance. The upside is the potential for people to work and commit more than they should, as well as having a loyalty even when things go wrong. The downside is the potential for a lack of scrutiny, a loyalty even when things go wrong. Yes, the strength is also a weakness. “This is a big complicated place, but Daddy at the top has everyone’s best interests at heart. Have faith. And if you see something you don’t understand, don’t ask too many questions. Have faith. It is better to follow the plan than to come up with your own. Have faith.”

There is, obviously, a religious dimension to this analysis, but it is worth noting that not all religion is faith in the sense I describe here. Some is. Conservative Protestant evangelicalism and fundamentalism is. And, it is also worth noting that we all have some measure of faith and some measure of trust. The question is, how do they relate to each other? Incremental trust and catastrophic faith do not easily work together. We live in a time of the ascendance of faith, perhaps in response to an increasingly complex world (that is, a world that not only is complex, but seems complex due to digital communication). Trust as a value is waning for many people – experts are not trusted, nor are institutions, nor is the precedent of past experience. Universities leverage faith in CEO-presidents, with wives and quasi-regal stories, rather than trust in procedures or expert input. The path to restoring trust as a narrative and as a virtue is not clear, but there is nothing to say that history is deterministic and that faith’s ascendency will continue unimpeded. The weakness, perhaps, is its overreach.

The columnist in this piece thinks that the English speaking world needs a new word from German: Heimat. This is a term which captures more than geographical place, but a state of belonging.... Continue reading...]]>

The columnist in this piece thinks that the English speaking world needs a new word from German: Heimat. This is a term which captures more than geographical place, but a state of belonging. “It’s the opposite of feeling alien; for most Germans, it is mixed with the smell of Christmas cookies from Mama’s kitchen. Heimat is about the landscape that left its mark on you, the culture that informed you and the people that inspired you when you were growing up.”

I’m not sure that English doesn’t already have this concept – it’s a place concept that’s actually pretty common. We talk about place attachment, sense of place, and a host of other things that pick out these intangibles. But what really interests me here are two things. First, the history of the term in a German context, and second, the writer’s sense that this term diagnoses our contemporary political and social malady.

First, the term in German history. The writer does make a passing nod to its use in Romanticism, and its co-option by the Nazis in their “Blood and Soil” doctrines. I think he underplays the sinister underside to the term. The Nazis didn’t just co-opt the term, they made it a center-piece of their public face. It was the reason for invading Poland – that was the historical and natural part of the German people. It was the cover that kept many Germans playing along with the war effort. After the insults heaped upon Germany after WWI, during the Weimar Republic, there was a strong sense that the German-ness of Germany had been taken away. And the rise of “decadent” art forms during that time, in Berlin, Vienna, and other places put a cultural face on that loss of Heimat. So, it wasn’t just co-opted by the Nazis. Its dark underbelly, nativism, came out, and it came out for similar reasons that we see today – a sense of threat to ways of life by new, scary, seemingly foreign ideas, values, and practices.

Heidegger and Gadamer both make much of Heimat. Heidegger links it not just to language but to dialect, thus reinforcing the regionalist sense. One reading might suggest that different places show forth different aspects of Being through the way they live in the world, and so, the regional differences must be preserved because without them we would lose a particular sense of what’s possible. That’s fine, except that this leads easily to a kind of exclusiveness, and a resistance to change. Gadamer turns away from the regionalism and sees Heimat as having an aesthetic nature. It is not so much home as homecoming, through literature, poetry, and all our forms of memory that exist not just to bring back the past, but to create it anew for a new time. Honoring Heimat doesn’t mean keeping it the same, but renewing it, speaking it again and again.

The columnist wants to have it both ways. He wants us to recognize the pull of Heimat, but also not follow the path to exclusiveness, which leads to something like nativism. I don’t think he’s thought this through, though. How do we really resist nativism, that insistence on the rightness and goodness of our way of doing things and the accompanying resistance to outsiders, to change, and to questioning, that comes with Heimat? Can we really have a love of our place, and not treat our place as the good place, the right place, and the best place, one which must not be corrupted by anyone or anything?

The political questions underlying Heimat are many. How did the place get to be a good place for many people? Was it because some other people made it that way, through forced labor, even slavery? Was it by conquest and war? What maintains it today? What was in fact borrowed from someone else but which we think of as our own? It is fine to have a sense of attachment to one’s place, but if that doesn’t come with some questions about how the place got to be good in the first place, it’s a kind of illusion.

I think the Heimat analysis is flawed in the column. Yes, attachment to place is fine. But it’s not just globalization that is perceived as a threat to peoples’ sense of belonging. Historically marginalized people in US society are demanding respect. One of the statistically strongest characteristics of those described as yearning for Heimat in the article, Trump voters, is to racism. This seems to me to be no coincidence. That doesn’t mean that every Trump voter is racist, it means that the statistical correlation is strong, and is supported by the policies of his government. In other words, Heimat for his voters has been translated into racial exclusivity. Over and over we see Trump tweeting about things that no president before him would have said in public, but which serve to signal to his base that he knows what their sense of Heimat is all about, and he’s going to give them the signifiers that they can interpret to mean that their sense of place is being restored.

Of course, it isn’t being restored. But the cultural signifiers do matter. Trump voters felt like they were being mocked throughout Obama’s presidency, because they were – just not for what they thought. They thought their lives, their values, their Heimat was being mocked. It wasn’t. Their intolerance was. Their willingness to let their gay sons and daughters die in the streets, disowned and rejected, was. Their hypocrisy was, and their sense that they personally had earned everything they had, without recognizing that social inequities and racism played a part in their success, was being mocked.

Their values? Nope, no one was mocking those. Not their lives, either, or their loves. The point was never to tell anyone that they couldn’t have what they had, but rather that everyone should have what they have. The ability to love who they wanted. The ability to be considered for jobs and housing equally to others. The ability to not get racially profiled and shot in the street for nothing. The ability to have every vote count and every voice heard. No one’s Heimat was being mocked, everyone was simply trying to lay claim to this home.

But that version of things is hard to hear, because we all think of ourselves as good people, and so if someone is laughing at us, that cuts to the quick. It becomes almost impossible to differentiate between our values and the illusions and sins those values cover over. The mocking is about our Heimat, we think, not about the illusions we hold in order to have that Heimat. Heimat is not just a Romantic notion, pure and good, but it comes with its own dark side, easily activated by those with political or religious ambition, or an inchoate sense of dissatisfaction, frustration, or hate.

The question remains, I think: how do we think about a sense of place, a love of place, without ending up with nativism? And, how do we counter the perversions of place that we see everywhere, in Trump’s America, Brexit, and in the nativism we see across Europe and beyond? We’ve not really thought about all of the current political crisis across the world as a problem of place, but in some sense it is.

We’ve already seen that, while Lamarckian genetics in its pure form might not be true, there is some sense that gene expression and environment can have an influence on genetic code. It’s not that giraffe babies have long necks because their parents stretched their necks to get the high leaves, but it is some form of feedback loop. Biological reductionism, when it comes to the constitution of the genome, is seriously questioned by all this.

Now this looks like another way of at least making the standard story about vertical inheritance more complicated. This is interesting. The idea that the complex system of biological life happens as it does not because of some idealized sense of vertical descent (and then the problem is that we just don’t know enough yet about the factors that influence that descent, but in principle we could), but because of accidents and other thing that mean that there’s no “in principle” knowledge possible. Now, this paper is about proto-cells, in other words, long before complex organisms like humans came on the scene. Human cells, like all eukaryotes, are protected against this kind of transfer. And, obviously, vertical inheritance is still the predominant mechanism for all sorts of reasons. But even there, it is less about one gene = one expression, than about an environment of genes having a range of expressions. What Evelyn Fox Keller called the “steady state model”, as opposed to the “master molecule model” of genetics.

This is more than just a refutation of reductionism, though. If that was all it meant, we could just catalogue the various systems that might influence a complex space and still think that if we know enough about all of them, we could somehow still predict what is going to happen. But we can’t, and I think we won’t ever be able to predict at a very fine-grained level. We can speak to the success of particular kinds of species, but not what specific species will emerge in what way.

This has implications past the genome, to any complex system. The economy, large bureaucracies and states, the weather, consciousness, cultures, the creation of concepts – it all works like this. In all these cases, the idea of vertical descent of influence is only part of the story. And we know that, in some of these other complex systems. We can try to predict the weather, but there’s a reason why we can only go a few days out. If we could predict the markets, we’d be billionaires (and, those who are billionaires can’t necessarily do what the rest of us cannot do – there are many reasons for success in the market apart from prediction). We thought we could predict the 2016 election in the US, and now we treat those who did as if they have special powers. If we could predict the components of consciousness, we’d have already created it artificially. And, we are far better at identifying influences in the past for evolution than we are at predicting its outcomes.

This also means that those truisms about any of these systems are at best very rough. They work except when they don’t. Buy low, sell high. Two weather fronts meeting have a particular set of effects. Biological pressures lead to particular kinds of outcomes. Raising the interest rate has particular effects.We can say that tech stocks generally will go up, but not which specific ones will, and some of course will go down.

Does that mean that we throw up our hands and give up? No, but it means that there are limits in complex systems to the cause-and-effect logic we think is the hallmark of knowledge. And, it does suggest one reason why we have such turbulence in the political sphere. Everyone still wants that cause-and-effect logic, and will yell louder until they win the argument, that is, they have power in the government and in culture. Immigrants cause economic problems! Gays cause the breakdown of society! Guns protect people! Liberals are brainwashing our youth! Take your pick on the easy answer – every time, it is an attempt to reassert this reductionist cause-and-effect reasoning in a complex system. Even when there are regularities, it’s easy to mistake what they actually are, and easy to overplay them. It is very attractive to think that you’re the smartest one in the room.

The world doesn’t act like that. None of it does. But it is psychologically satisfying to think it does, and it builds groups to assert a series of oversimplified answers to a complex world. Those assertions are, in a sense, beside the point, though. There are always unexpected interventions in the story we think we know about how things work. A Trump comes along and wins an election. Some kids find a voice and challenge the NRA (will they be successful? Time will tell).

This is a reason for something like a phenomenological approach (which comes with a lot of humility towards these complex systems, as well as a recursive instinct that always includes the knower in the calculations of the known), and a Deleuzian approach, which thinks more in terms of material interactions than abstract rules of inference, and which is oriented toward the new rather than the predictable.

]]>https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/on-horizontal-transfer-of-code-in-biology-and-on-complexity-in-general/feed/013 New Indictments by the grand jury in the Mueller Commissionhttps://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/13-new-indictments-by-the-grand-jury-in-the-mueller-commission/
https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/13-new-indictments-by-the-grand-jury-in-the-mueller-commission/#respondFri, 16 Feb 2018 19:12:20 +0000http://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/?p=1306https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/16/robert-mueller-russians-charged-election This just dropped. So the grand jury found enough evidence to charge these with conspiracy to defraud the United States. That means that there’s enough evidence to go forward with a trial for... Continue reading...]]>

This just dropped. So the grand jury found enough evidence to charge these with conspiracy to defraud the United States. That means that there’s enough evidence to go forward with a trial for these (doesn’t mean a conviction, but if there’s enough evidence to go forward, it doesn’t look good). This also means that it’s going to be a lot harder to claim a lack of knowledge about all this for the Trump campaign, given what is already known about meetings. Expect more grand jury announcements in the near future, targeting members of the Trump team, including those very close to the president. Expect also more drama connected to attempts to fire Mueller and his team (and, it just got even harder to do so, with these announcements, and not look like the president is obstructing justice).

If this were Russia, it’s pretty clear we’d be seeing more poisonings and other murders. It’s not Russia. But it will be interesting to see how far the reigning party will go to try to derail this (and I do deliberately use the metaphors of kingship here). When one group is absolutely convinced that it is right, no matter what, that opens the door to a lot of means/ends deliberations.

There will at least be charges of fake news, biased media, unfairness of all sorts, as there always are. Behind this is the assumption that if it were a level playing field, the extremist right would win every time. In a “fair fight”, the right is right. And yet, we constantly see that the charges made by the right exactly describe their own behavior. Every charge is met by a counter-charge. Every discussion is derailed, every question is muddied.

We know this. If this was Russia, we would already be further down this path, toward cynicism and a hall of mirrors in the public sphere. It would not be a traditional monarchy, but a shadow monarchy, the fist in the velvet glove, the illusion of participation in democracy without the reality in any way.

Many would argue that that’s what we have in the US as well. Corporations own the public sphere. And it’s true. But it’s worse there. There could be no Mueller commission there. In the US, there can be. Does this mean that it is where all our hope lies? Of course not. Even if we were to get everything we want from that commission, that is, solid gold proof of tampering in the elections, not just charges but convictions against major players, it still wouldn’t solve the problem of discourse in the public sphere in the US. It still wouldn’t solve the extent to which corporate influence, and the influence of a few very wealthy people, have dominated what we think is worth talking about and the range of solutions we are willing to consider. The fact that there are no meaningful gun laws, after all that has happened, testifies to this. The corporate lobbying group known as the NRA has determined what the public conversation is like, despite repeated surveys that indicate that the majority of people want to consider a new set of laws about guns.

So, Mueller isn’t going to solve anything by himself. Trump will not be impeached even in the best scenario, given the current make-up of the government and the courts. Will it change in November? Hopefully, but that too isn’t a solution in itself.

The deeper issue continues to be the widening gulf between worldviews in the US. We continue to be heirs of the Enlightenment, in which deep differences can be discussed, and governmental structures can be set up, to try to bring about the best of worlds to those living with very different worldviews. Those structures are breaking down. How badly are they breaking down? That’s actually a good question. Those who are riding Trump’s coattails right now are very loud, but are they the majority? They weren’t in the last election. They are still very loud, but it is likely that they are still outnumbered. The traditional way to make that difference operative is through the ballot box (and, the special elections over the past year have skewed strongly in favor of Democrats, or put more pointedly, in favor of opposition to Trump and his surrogates), but it is not the only way.

So, is this a good day? Sure. What this commission is doing is setting an agenda for public conversation, and doing so in a way that corporate power can’t touch. To be sure, some specific corporations without question welcome these investigations – lawlessness is bad for business, unless you’re directly profiting from that lawlessness. My hope, though, is that the current administration spends all of its time answering the charges raised by Mueller, and has less time to destroy all that is good in the country.

]]>https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/13-new-indictments-by-the-grand-jury-in-the-mueller-commission/feed/0Jacob Benjamin Janz (1931-2008)https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/jacob-benjamin-janz-1931-2008/
https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/jacob-benjamin-janz-1931-2008/#respondFri, 19 Jan 2018 14:07:27 +0000http://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/?p=1119Ten years ago today, my dad died. It doesn’t seem that long ago. I realized that it has been ten years just yesterday, when I was thinking about memory and how it works. Much has... Continue reading...]]>Ten years ago today, my dad died. It doesn’t seem that long ago. I realized that it has been ten years just yesterday, when I was thinking about memory and how it works. Much has been written, in many disciplines, about memory, about how it works and how we tell its stories and what’s included and what’s left out. We now talk about whose memory should be trusted (that’s part of what the me-too movement is about) and how memory is denied or manipulated (we now call that “gaslighting”), and whose memory gets to prevail when there is a dispute or something on the line.

But memories of a parent – that’s much more personal than most of these contested aspects of memory. Not to say that none of this is relevant – there can be disputes when we are remembering the personal as well. The challenge, though, is more intimate and personal. How do you remember someone? I was faced with this issue quickly, as I did the eulogy at his memorial service. How can I say something true, at a time like this?

Derrida grappled with this a great deal – it seemed that he was constantly faced with writing and speaking about his dead friends. Many of those are collected in his The Work of Mourning. I thought back to that, as I recall, when I was faced with writing about my father. There is far too much in that book to unpack here, but his idea that living is mourning struck me. It doesn’t mean that one should go around morbid all the time, but that we are always writing our memories of people, of ourselves. Fixing those meanings might be like killing them, and ourselves, and yet writing isn’t like putting something down in a permanent, unchanging form.

So, this is memory. It’s not just about speaking the truth about my dad at the time of his death, although it is that. It’s not just speaking his life as he would have wanted it spoken, although perhaps there is also some of that. It is about how they are not fixed in memory, not before they die, at the time of death, or even 10 years later. They haunt us, not as ghosts but as something which can unseat our stories and make us re-evaluate things that we might think are settled. They can do that, long after they are gone.

My dad wasn’t the only significant person to die at that time. My friend Emmanuel Eze passed away a couple of weeks before my dad did. In fact, I had to miss Emmanuel’s funeral because I was at my dad’s. I wrote a memorial for him as well, which you can find here. I could, and perhaps will, think about those two deaths in proximity to each other, in a future post. But for now, here’s what I said at my dad’s funeral.

+++

Jacob Benjamin Janz (1931-2008)

Bruce B. Janz

Memorial: January 24, 2008

I’d like to thank all of you for coming, on behalf of the whole family. It means a lot that you are here, some of you from great distances. And others who couldn’t be here have contacted us. We appreciate all the kind thoughts, words, and actions at this time.

How do I speak about my own father, at a time like this? What can I say, that we will all recognize, that we can all say, yes, that’s him all right? Those are the things he really cared about, that’s who he was. That’s the image of God in him.

Let me start with a memory, specifically a memory of my dad building things. When dad built something, it stayed built. He made a doghouse for my sister Lydine, for instance, a surprise when you consider that he was hardly a dog person. That doghouse, as I recall, was strong enough to survive flying off the back of a truck at highway speeds when it was being moved – we were more concerned about the highway, in fact, than the doghouse. He built a barbeque out of bricks in the back yard, which could have served as a fallout shelter if it were only a little larger. He remodeled my bedroom in the basement of our house on Mayfair Crescent, with shelving made from 2×10’s, boards that might have been used as load-bearing beams. I used to climb on them, I recall, and marvel that so much wood was necessary to hold up so few books. And years later, in 2001, when I had a house in Camrose, dad came and helped me refinish two rooms in the basement. I remember he kept apologizing at the time for not being able to work faster – I thought he was doing a fine job. None of us realized at the time that his “slowness” was more than just a symptom of age, but foreshadowed his illness to come.

Dad’s theory of building was, why use one nail when six will do? And glue will help too – how could it not? And 2x10s are always better than 1x8s. Everything he built was made to withstand the worst that Saskatchewan weather or unruly children could muster. When it came time to remodel or take something apart, he was always annoyed at how hard it would be, but then the next thing he’d build would be just as over-engineered, just as resistant to the forces of nature, just as incorruptible.

We used to kid him about what, to us, was overkill, but I think he was trying to tell us something about how the world looked to him, and what his responsibility in the world was. For him the world was a place where, without proper care and attention, everything was liable to fall apart. His job was to put his world into order, to make it last, to care for it. And that job was more than a perfectionist impulse, it was a spiritual discipline.

His theory of building was his theory of life. Let me give you a few examples.

Anyone who knew dad for more than about 5 minutes would know just how important his faith was. He was passionate about the church and the Scriptures. He taught Bible classes for years, and it’s pretty clear that had he not been a principal of elementary schools in Regina for so many years, he would have been a minister. His classes were very carefully researched. He prepared for hours for those classes. Getting it right was so important – it was his way of honouring God. Even though one might not agree with some position or interpretation he had (and, it should be said, there were a fair number of times when he and I didn’t see eye to eye), it was always apparent that he had carefully considered his position, and carefully read the Bible and other relevant work. Honouring God, for Dad, meant making his part of the world as high-quality as possible. Making faith tangible meant putting the world into order, making it last, and caring for it.

That concern with his faith started with his own upbringing. His father Abram Janz and his mother Justina Janz were excellent Christian examples. All seven of their children, Adelina, Leona, Waldemar, Arnold, Jacob, Malinda, and Rubina followed their parents’ lead in matters of faith. Dad’s faith only became stronger as he went to Bible college at Briercrest, in the 1950s. His involvement with the church throughout his life, and with the Far East Broadcasting Company from the late 80s into the 1990s, was his passion and joy.

A primary expression of faith for dad was music. I recall that we used to go out to see Bert Hiebert in Caronport, when I was young, and I didn’t understand at the time that this was not just a friend of dad’s, but one of his quartet friends. They were special. Those quartets in Bible college, and for years afterward, were a source of such joy, and they were a great triumph of his life. He was proud of being a member of what some people thought of as one of the best quartets in the history of Briercrest.

After Bible college, when dad was teaching in Regina, the music continued, and out of that music emerged close friendships. We were regularly at Phil and Marcia Leskewich’s place, Lawrence and Esther Schmuland’s, Al and Verna Peter’s, and many others, who were involved in music with dad, and I remember these as good times and close friendships for him. He became choir director in this church, and held that position for something like 25 years. Whatever musical project he was involved in, had to be done right. That was what care meant – you don’t just wing it, you don’t settle for second best. Doing it right honoured God. I know that when he finished with the choir, and eventually Linda Phillips picked it up and continued with it to this day, he was satisfied that it would be held to the same standard he always had for it. That’s more than just perfectionism, I think. That’s a deep sense of what God asks of us – only the best.

And, teaching, in all its forms, was always a part of his life. Dad wrote a memoir a few years ago, primarily about his life in teaching and as a principal. One striking thing about this memoir is how much he refers to the struggles he had, with problem students, difficult teachers, and angry parents. You might almost get the sense that he didn’t enjoy it. But in fact, he did, and he was very good at it. He was sent to schools that had serious problems, to bring them back to health. He opened new schools, and had an opportunity to mould them from the outset into fine institutions. Again, he was putting his world into order, making it last, and caring for it, as God asked of him. Time and again in the memoir you get the picture of someone who struggled to recognize the right thing to do (although, once recognized, he never struggled to do the right thing). There were many prayers. But it struck me that his memoir was not boastful, even in the successes. It was never about how clever he was in figuring out a situation. It was the writing of someone who looked to God in all things, and was able to take pleasure when he saw God’s direction, and a situation was made better.

But more than his school teaching, he was also a mentor to many. In the way that he conducted himself with music, with Bible teaching, with everything, he modeled what it meant to give your best to God. And I believe that his influence will continue, in his children and family certainly, but in many others as well. He was someone you could depend on. If Jake was doing it, it would be done right.

Dad’s second major career was with the Far East Broadcasting Company, as its Canadian director. He had been involved with them, even while he was still a principal, and I think they saw in him a strong leader, an efficient administrator, and above all, someone with a passion for telling the world about Jesus. He loved the travel associated with that job. But most of all, he loved meeting people who shared his passion. It was, in some ways, a real achievement for him to be part of such a vibrant ministry. And, as significant as FEBC was his ongoing association with Briercrest Bible College, by being on its board for many years. That was important to him – it was the site of memorable times for him as a student, it was the place he insisted that his kids go after high school, for at least a year, and it was the place of people he admired, such as presidents Henry Hildebrand, Henry Budd, and our own John Barkman.

I think that sense of getting it right, and his accomplishments, were closely linked to the struggles he faced throughout life. Not much was just handed to him. First, he was faced with the comparatively young passing of his father, before I was born. Then, there was the death of his first wife, my birth mother, Ruby. Around the same time, he had to deal with me having a host of illnesses, which were serious enough that one night he was told I wouldn’t make it to the morning, and if I did, I’d have brain damage (my sisters still get mileage out of that). In order to earn his teaching degree, he had to go to university for nine summers, while he was already teaching. These were very difficult things. And later, there were several major challenges with his health. All these were struggles, even crises of faith. But he always had a strong sense that God was guiding, and providing strength. He continually put his faith in God, and even though there were times that sorely tested that faith, the faith always won out.

So, he achieved many things in the areas he valued, and he did so faced with some serious challenges. But it is essential, in understanding my dad, to understand another facet of him: he loved those around him. This is something I had to learn about him, because I often did not understand, growing up, that teaching us about his sense of order and quality, and expecting us to live up to it, was a form of love for him. But he did love. He loved his brothers and sisters, and always looked forward to seeing them. He loved his first wife Ruby, and was devastated by her untimely and shocking passing. He loved his second wife, Elaine, and that love grew and matured through the years. Mom told me of the times that we kids didn’t see, the tender, romantic times. His sense of propriety was such that these moments were private, for him and his beloved. But they were there, and they were real. He would have done anything for her.

And, he loved his kids. We all, I think, turned out differently than he might have predicted at the beginning, but I know he took great pride in all our successes. He loved our choices in mates, and admired the qualities of the people we also loved. Lydine found Rick, and Janine found Sheldon, and both were just excellent choices, and always have been. He never had a question about that. My partner Lisa was with me at Christmas when we saw him. He’d met her already, a couple of years before. I asked him, when she went away for a minute, what he thought of her. Even with his difficulty speaking for the last several months, I heard him say the clearest and most emphatic thing I’ve heard from him in ages: “Excellent”. One word, three syllables, clear as day. It was the old dad, just for a brief moment. Yes, excellent indeed, I thought. He wanted me to be happy, fulfilled, successful, and loved, and he knew I was, and it was all excellent.

And he loved his grandkids. It was a transition for him to move from thinking of kids in terms of a school environment to thinking of them as part of his lineage, but he did it. He saw Logan and Jolene grow up into the fine young people that they are, and he was pleased. He read to Katie and played with Sarah, and they made him young. Your grandpa loved you all. If anyone asks, you can tell them that.

Jacob Benjamin Janz was born in Main Center, Saskatchewan, on June 13, 1931, son of Abram and Justina, and passed away, peaceful in body and soul, in Regina Saskatchewan on January 19, 2008, surrounded by his wife and children. Between those two dates, he built a great deal, and in doing so put his world into order, made it last, and cared for it. He loved the Lord his God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength. And, he loved his neighbor as himself. What could be better than that? This was a good, decent, godly life, a life of love and quality and care, and I loved him, and I will miss him.

]]>https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/jacob-benjamin-janz-1931-2008/feed/0Writing and Capturing New Ideashttps://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/writing-and-capturing-new-ideas/
https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/writing-and-capturing-new-ideas/#respondThu, 18 Jan 2018 21:17:32 +0000http://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/?p=1124I imagine, as I work on the current book, some point in the future in which what I think is put on the page immediately, ready for me to edit, move around, and the rest... Continue reading...]]>I imagine, as I work on the current book, some point in the future in which what I think is put on the page immediately, ready for me to edit, move around, and the rest of it. Ideas just flit through my field of vision, and I fantasize that if I had such direct mind-to-page interface, I’d be able to capture all those things that seem so great as they fly by. (Wait, isn’t that exactly what Facebook already is? No…not yet).

And then I think, would that be a good world? I mean, everyone would be able to do that, not just me. If we think we have loads of text now, much of which consists of hot takes, half-baked ideas, reactions, and all the rest, what would that look like? But my ideas are better, right? Well, no, not really.

I remember an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which the kids of the Enterprise were taken away by this planet of highly advanced people. They couldn’t have kids themselves, so they thought they’d just take the ones that came by. They’d treat them well, of course. Treating them well meant, in part, aiding their mental development. So, for this one kid, they gave him a tool that would allow him to sculpt whatever he could think of. I think the first thing he sculpted was a totally stereotypical dolphin (it was the 80s).

That scene always annoyed me. So the kid could make material whatever was floating around in his head. Great. So, where is he going to get his ideas from? Clearly not struggling with material that didn’t do what he wanted it to. Clearly not reading more and more, thinking, what exactly am I trying to say in this book?

So, this goes back to Hegel, and through Heidegger and lots of others. The material world matters. We don’t just come up with ideas first, and then “make it so”, to quote Jean-Luc Picard.

And yet, I keep thinking that I want a stenographer. No, audio capture (i.e., Dragon Naturally Speaking and its ilk) won’t do. I’m trying to capture meanings and ideas, not just words. Aren’t we all?

Believe it or not, writing these little things on Facebook is part of the process of allowing things to solidify enough to be able to be written down. Sometimes it is working out an idea, even quite obliquely (no one would ever be able to trace the good that a quick post made in actual writing). Sometimes it is a matter of taking a break to let something percolate, but keeping the typing fingers active. Sometimes it is the hope of a comment or discussion that spurs things along further (although, many people I follow have far better luck at that than I do).

Ok, back to African philosophy.

]]>https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/writing-and-capturing-new-ideas/feed/0Mine not minehttps://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/mine-not-mine/
https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/mine-not-mine/#respondTue, 16 Jan 2018 17:12:18 +0000http://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/?p=1106I’ve seen several people raise the question of whether this American president is “my” president. Obviously, that is a question Americans are asking – the rest of the world is saying, you broke it, you... Continue reading...]]>I’ve seen several people raise the question of whether this American president is “my” president. Obviously, that is a question Americans are asking – the rest of the world is saying, you broke it, you bought it. He’s all yours. But for a large number of people in the US, the question of whether he’s “my” president is a live one.

As I said in a comment on someone else’s thread, the word “my” is the real problem here, isn’t it? It can refer to ownership (my car), or relation (my spouse), or representation (my lawyer), or responsibility (my cat), or origination (my idea), or defining aspiration (my beliefs or ideals), or motivating agent (my subconscious), or essence (my body), or group (my people), or probably a bunch of other things. But of course, it’s more complex than this. No one of these examples is an example of only one version of “my”. I own my car, but I also have responsibility for it. And, it might express my essence, as an extension of my body. So, identifying different senses of “my” only foregrounds a prominent version of the word, it doesn’t separate out discrete and unrelated uses.

There’s no problem in saying “my” when there’s something we like. This is true even when the claim of “my” is tenuous, or completely made up. White people say “my” to all sorts of technological innovations, and the very idea of innovation itself, when it can be shown that the claim is false. “My” country (like “my” faith) is more than a statement of belonging, it is also a projection of one’s own ideals, in some cases one’s own fervent wishes (whether they are ideal or not). It makes it easy to marginalize things you don’t like (so, various actions of the American government, or of faith leaders, can be denied as being part of my country or my faith, because these things can only be understood in their ideal form). The standard evangelical answer to any criticism is to say that that’s not “my” faith, that’s some other version of Christianity, and mine is pure and lovely and in every way good (as am I, of course, since I’m the one who holds that view). And, to take the logic further, anyone criticizing us doesn’t really understand “my” faith, and so they are unfair to me and to it (note, by the way, how often the president uses the term “unfair” – this is where it comes from, I think). It’s why people can maintain that Christians are the most persecuted people in the country, when it looks for all the world like the opposite of that. My, mine.

A popularized version of Buddhism says that we should turn our back on possessions. Or, as Homer Simpson intones after destroying some of his daughter Lisa’s stuff, “Possessions are fleeting.” A better understanding (which can also be found, in its own way, in the Christian mystical tradition) is to give up on attachments. That’s hard, with so much “my”, but not all of these sorts of “my” are attachments, at least, not in the same way. The stuff about giving up on attachments always comes with a recognition that we have to get from here to there, that it doesn’t just happen. How does one really give up? I guess the first step is to realize that one’s attachments are not a scoring system. Having more, or having the right things, doesn’t mean that you win at life.

I doubt that turning one’s back on an odious American president counts as giving up on attachments, in the Buddhist or mystical sense. Paula White, the president’s spiritual advisor, has reportedly told people to give one month’s salary to her church or “face consequences”. I doubt we could say that she is giving up on attachments, but the reliance on attachments, whether material or propositional is, after all, a defining feature of evangelicalism, as it is with conservative politics. Property is at the core of both of these, and that property is extended to ideas, beliefs, and lots of other things. The various versions of “my” boil down to ownership.

But there is an attachment to give up on here, I think. We are attached to the things that we think will save us. The Muller commission, the institutions of democracy, the courts, the voters (especially black women), the next flashy candidate (Oprah, anyone?), the guy who “would have won”, the ground game, the efforts against gerrymandering — fill in your favorite thing that will make this November bearable and make 2020 a return to good times. Am I saying that all is lost, that nothing will save us, that the world is in a decline that leads even further to oligarchy? No. I’m saying that there’s no magic bullet here. Every one of these is retrodiction put in the service of prediction. Retrodiction is the identification of causes and effects in the past as if they were in the future. It’s not learning from the past, it is imposing a narrative on the past in the desire to use that narrative to control the future.

What is “mine” in this, is the narrative. It’s justification is in the past – look, this happened and then that happened, and that justifies my view of the world. What is lost is that there is enormous risk of confirmation bias here. Superhero movies are great examples of this. What makes a superhero? It is not super powers. It is the ability to control the future in some way. So, it doesn’t really matter that Superman has “powers” and Batman doesn’t. It matters that both control what goes on around them, in all sorts of ways.

We all dream of that. In a chaotic world, we love the hero who makes the world right and just. It’s not so different from the skateboarder who lands the trick on video. With all these things, we see the successful event, and forget that it might have taken a hundred or a thousand tries to get there, or that CGI might have been necessary, or a crew of practical effects experts, or a stunt double. Superheroes allow us to think that there is a world in which people can get that right the first time, every time. Hawkeye doesn’t miss, Captain America figures out a plan, Hulk smashes, Ironman just invents a new thing, and it always makes things right. Competence means control. It is the desperate story that at lies at the heart of white supremacy, and misogyny, and lots of other problematic modern beliefs – there is control, and me and my group have it.

The world isn’t like that, but retrodictive narratives make us believe that they could be. They make us believe that the world could be mine. And that’s what has to be given up. That’s the attachment that must be shed, because it isn’t true to reality. Reality isn’t mine.

Is he my president? Yes and no and everything in between. I was never attached to him in the first place, so there’s nothing to give up in that sense. But he’s not mine in the sense that he and his people haven’t given up anything. They firmly believe that the world can be controlled. If one must give up this kind of “my”, one must also give up those who themselves haven’t given it up, who think that the world is there to be controlled and they are the ones to do it. That also means, by the way, that we must give up the technocrats and bureaucrats who also think this. In the end, I’m not sure who’s more damaging in the long run, a president who is absolutely sure of his view of the world, and believes he is the master controller, or those who think that with just a few little tweaks to a system it will all run like clockwork. What I do know, though, is that the hubris of control is at the root of a lot of the violence that this country has inflicted on itself, its citizens, and the world. I’m not sure whether the US has within its intellectual resources the ability to move out of that hubris – this might be how empires fade away.

All I can say is: my, my, my.

]]>https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/mine-not-mine/feed/0The Kabuki Theatre of Higher Ed Assessmenthttps://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/the-kabuki-theatre-of-higher-ed-assessment/
https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/the-kabuki-theatre-of-higher-ed-assessment/#respondTue, 16 Jan 2018 15:31:31 +0000http://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/?p=1110https://www.chronicle.com/article/An-Insider-s-Take-on/242235?cid=wcontentlist_hp_5 My inclination in response to this article is to say, yeah, we’ve been making all these points for 10+ years to deaf ears. Lisa read parts of this to me this morning, interspersed... Continue reading...]]>https://www.chronicle.com/article/An-Insider-s-Take-on/242235?cid=wcontentlist_hp_5

My inclination in response to this article is to say, yeah, we’ve been making all these points for 10+ years to deaf ears. Lisa read parts of this to me this morning, interspersed with “hey, you’ve been saying this”. Not just me. Lots of others. I remember being in rooms where assessment people were telling us about the latest and greatest tools, rubrics, etc. My problems were always philosophical, specifically epistemological – we are purporting to create knowledge about a program – what kind of knowledge is it, how is it formed, is it reliable, are there other and better methods? I never got a good answer from anyone involved about any of these questions. The article mentions Upton Sinclair’s famous and apt line, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

One of the most troubling responses I would get was “Well, we know it’s not perfect, but do the best you can with it. You can derive some benefit from the exercise, can’t you?” This was always an abdication of the challenge to answer the epistemological questions. Not only are there far too many pitfalls, of many sorts, for academic assessment to be useful (and those pitfalls range from the obvious ones of the problems of operationalizing success for a program by measuring student outcomes, to less obvious ones of incentivizing a fundamentally broken instrument to be used by faculty who intuitively or explicitly can see through the flaws, and also the downstream effects of changing programs based on data gathered by untrained statisticians and surveyers (i.e. faculty and staff) into a factory model of education), there is also the unwillingness to actually answer a direct question with a clear answer which undermines any sense that assessment is anything other a program to undermine faculty expertise and force them to teach in a manner they know to be less effective, so that some office or bureaucrat somewhere can be convinced that they are doing their jobs.

Let’s face it: assessment communicates one thing, to faculty and everyone else: faculty are not trusted, they are not regarded as professional, and there must be micromanagement of what they are doing or the whole enterprise will descend into chaos. Many are convinced that that’s where the whole enterprise currently is. This is part and parcel of the meme that extends across the political spectrum in the US, but which thrives the most on the right: education in general and higher education in particular is a complete mess, and it needs to be fixed ASAP.

Are there problems in higher ed? Sure. Some of those are because it is a conservative (i.e., slow to change) enterprise. But some of the problems have been caused by the putative solutions, the framing of education as populated by “those who can’t, teach” people, the turning of education into a business, with CEOs and more and more offices, each purporting to solve something or serve someone, and each requiring something out of those who are there to teach.

So, assessment is just one of those tools that does not, and cannot, get the desired result of a higher quality education, because it is not set up to do that. It is set up to produce apples-to-apples comparisons between programs, so that administrators have an easy rubric for determining efficiency. It’s an old version of efficiency which supposes that it comes from a manager who has the data at his fingertips and can tweak systems to maximize their outputs. Even when it looks like the control over improvement is distributed to the programs and faculty themselves (“This is for your self-improvement, it’s not surveillance! Really! We’re the benevolent ones here!”), it is still a version of efficiency that doesn’t actually reflect how complex systems actually change.

I once asked a high-level administrator why he wasn’t a billionaire yet. His attitude was that he could oversee a large complex system, and through his superior oversight, knowledge, experience, and all that, could maximize things. But it’s not actually much different from the stock market, or the weather, or evolution. We’re always much better at looking back than we are looking forward. No one is much good at looking forward, including important high-level administrators. So, if someone claims the insight to manage the chaos of a university, that person should also be able to reliably pick winners in the market, and be ridiculously rich.

He laughed, but I also think I went on his mental list of “troublemakers – minimize contact”. But it’s true. The reason we have programs like assessment is that legislatures and accreditation bureaus ask administrators to do the impossible, which is to guarantee growth and a rise in quality, as defined along very specific measures. And so, administrators put in place tools that they hope will work. They don’t. Assessment doesn’t work, nor do most of the tools used for raising grant production, research production, or anything else. But administrative salaries depend on not understanding, or admitting, any of this, and they depend on not being willing to actually think about how complex systems really work, and what their role in those might look like. Because, their role may well be vastly diminished.

So, we continue to go through the motions of assessment. None of the epistemological questions are answered, and until they are, there is just Kabuki theatre. After trying for years to ask those questions, and being rebuffed at every turn, I’ve given up.

]]>https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/the-kabuki-theatre-of-higher-ed-assessment/feed/0Blog spacehttps://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/blog-space/
https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/blog-space/#respondSat, 06 Jan 2018 21:58:43 +0000http://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/?p=890I’m going to repost some of the posts I’ve made on Facebook over the last year or so, to this blog, so that they remain accessible. I’ll put up the original posting dates and links... Continue reading...]]>I’m going to repost some of the posts I’ve made on Facebook over the last year or so, to this blog, so that they remain accessible. I’ll put up the original posting dates and links to any articles, but I won’t pull in all the comments. Going forward, I’ll post on this blog and link to Facebook, or in some cases post to both places.
]]>https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/blog-space/feed/0Banks and repressed ragehttps://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/banks-and-repressed-rage/
https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/banks-and-repressed-rage/#respondFri, 05 Jan 2018 15:59:00 +0000http://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/?p=1035from Jan. 5, 2018

Going into a bank, any bank, is for me an exercise in carefully repressed rage. The people who work there are generally perfectly nice. But it is all against a... Continue reading...]]>

from Jan. 5, 2018

Going into a bank, any bank, is for me an exercise in carefully repressed rage. The people who work there are generally perfectly nice. But it is all against a backdrop of sustained abuse and lack of respect for anyone who isn’t worth millions of dollars. My bank, Wells Fargo, is one of the worst, but there are few that are much better. From pouring gasoline on the mortgage crisis in the mid 00’s, to creating bogus accounts for customers, to lobbying for (and essentially writing) parts of the recent tax cut bill, which will be a $250 billion bonus for the financial services sector alone, the actions of this company at almost every turn, turns my stomach.

So, when I went in to try to cash a check from the insurance company to cover hurricane damage to our roof, I should have expected problems. Again, the employees are perfectly nice (and I don’t blame them – everyone needs a job), but the labyrinth of procedures to get the money from the insurance company to pay the contractor is crushing. The signal is loud and clear – people are not to be trusted, but banks must be trusted.

Well, I don’t. Which is why walking into a bank is always an exercise in repressed rage. The words and the actions don’t match up. Those nice employees say all the right things, even express sympathy. Those are words. And yet, at every turn, the actions speak far louder, and completely differently. And there is little or no consequence for bad behaviour (which undermines what a market is supposed to do, punish bad actors and reward good ones). Tax bills like the recent one reward all bad behaviour, and send the bill for that behaviour to those of us who have played by the rules, followed every good practice, and actually cared for those less fortunate.

So Wells Fargo is engaging in some publicity stunts, to show that they’re really good guys after all. Raise their minimum wage to $15 – hey, you liberals, you should love that, right? Isn’t that what you want? $400 million to “community organizations”, whatever that means. A drop in the bucket, compared to the slaps on the wrist they get for bad behaviour and the billions earned off of it. And, of course, this recent travesty of a tax bill, written by lobbyists and passed in the dead of night, with no discussion.

I know, the solution for many people is to go to local banks, smaller credit unions, that sort of thing. That’s not really an answer, or rather, that’s an answer that personalizes and individualizes the problem. We imagine that if enough of us did that, the market would work its magic, punish the bad actors, and restore the will of the people.

Except that it won’t. The market doesn’t work like that, or rather, it only works like that in Republican fantasies. It’s way, way more complex, and there is no such cause-and-effect relationship that can confer any moral response. Opting for a credit union might make me feel better, somewhat diminish the rage I feel when I enter the doors of these brothels, but it doesn’t really solve much.

I continue to try to get the money for our roof damage out of this bank. Apparently I only need to submit a small pallet of documents, to ensure that I, the morally suspect one in this relationship, actually use the money to fix the roof. Because I am the one we should be worrying about, not a corporation that profited on the misery of millions with impunity.

The attached article (click on the above picture) is interesting, and gets at something I’ve been thinking for quite awhile, at least in part, which is that there is a... Continue reading...]]>

From Dec. 17, 2017

The attached article (click on the above picture) is interesting, and gets at something I’ve been thinking for quite awhile, at least in part, which is that there is a strong flow of styles of thought across the conservative religious and political space. Said like that, it hardly seems new, but what I mean is that there is an epistemology within evangelicalism rooted in the 18th and 19th century which was honed there and exported to politics. A political position or statement doesn’t have to be theological to be evangelical.

This makes someone like Trump an evangelical, even as he is (as this article says) a prime example of “What would Jesus not do?” Not a Christian, of course, but an evangelical. This article makes the important point that “The result is a malleable religious identity that can be weaponized not just to complain about department stores that hang “Happy Holidays” banners, but more significantly, in support of politicians like Mr. Trump or Mr. Moore — and of virtually any policy, so long as it is promoted by someone Fox evangelicals consider on their side of the culture war.”

This is what I and many others have elsewhere called tribalism. That term is meant to evoke a kind of sealed, prerational, mutually reinforcing set of beliefs and practices. But the term has its problems. For one, the reference is to what we used to think “tribes” were like, which was primitive. That’s not a good reference, because it keeps alive the mistaken and racist ideas that so-called “primitive” groups are like that. They aren’t.

Another problem with the term “tribal” is that it tends to put weight on practices and not on epistemology. That’s not a necessary thing, but it is how we tend to think about tribalism. It is about looking out for “my” people, believing that their intentions are good and actions are praiseworthy, while thinking that “your” people have bad intentions, even when an action seems good. All that is true, but there’s something more to the evangelical cult.

1. It is an epistemology of inner light. In philosophy we might call that “intuitionism”. This is usually a term used in ethics for the idea that there are moral facts in the universe that cannot be reduced to natural facts, and that we can know only through our intuition (i.e., not through arguments or other kinds of evidence).

In the case of evangelicals, intuitionism extends to everything, not just ethics. It is the intuition of the inner light, the intuition that comes when you think you have the truth of God on your side. This intuitionism extends far past the central tenets of faith, to things that the Bible has very little to say about (abortion, homosexuality) or nothing to say about (guns, economic systems, most of contemporary culture). But intuitionism allows, even insists on, extrapolation.

It also demands conformity. Difference is delusion. If something or someone feels wrong, it’s not because one’s feelings have been built in an isolationist culture, but because the spirit is telling us something. So, intuitionism demands conformity, familiarity, safety.

2. This renders argumentation to being more like a tool of battle than a space where people can come to mutual understanding. Put bluntly, evangelicals believe that they already understand everyone else, and there is nothing important that they can learn from talking to anyone. Their reasoning is sanctified – not pure, but able to be corrected by God – whereas the reasoning of everyone else is fundamentally flawed, with no external mechanism of correction.

So, we can see tactics of argumentation which a philosopher might consider to be logical fallacies, used on a regular basis. There is guilt by association (especially useful on questions of race – assume that black people are fundamentally bad just because they’re black, whereas the same action by a white person can be overlooked or forgiven), ad hominem arguments (just about every counter-attack that Trump makes), questionable labels (see again: Trump), and red herrings (every time you see something in the “But what about X!” category – Hillary, liberal failings, etc – you’re seeing a red herring). These are logically bad but rhetorically effective arguments.

3. This means that each side sees the other as insufferably arrogant. Evangelicals see non-e people as clinging to flawed reason and resisting God, and as such arrogant because they trust their own reason above God’s. Non-e people see evangelicals as rejecting evidence, the ideas and opinions of other people, and trusting in a version of God that could easily be evangelical groupthink, or the rhetoric of powerful and influential people (like pastors and Fox News pundits), or just their own conclusions based on suspicion of institutions and people not controlled by evangelicals (i.e., those outside God’s team).

There is a strange double consciousness among evangelicals about this. On the one hand, the intuitionism means that the inner light of God’s reason guides us, and so therefore rational debate should be irrelevant. And yet, there is a strong core of dialectical practice among evangelicalism. There is argumentation, but it is weaponized in the sense that the point is to get people to intuitionism.

This is why one should never argue with an evangelical. Not because discussion is not a good idea in general, but because evangelicals and non-evangelicals aren’t playing the same game, and don’t have the same rules. One side thinks that discussion should result in both sides coming to the best position together, based on evidence, and the other side thinks that they already know what’s right, because of intuition, and argumentation is there to disrupt and unsettle the process of reasonably coming to the best conclusion. It reminds me of an old Onion headline: “Pope Calls for Greater Understanding Between Catholics, Hellbound.”

This is true for more than just religious questions. This is true in politics as well. If someone says “everyone is entitled to his opinion”, that really means – “those who have not seen the light have their opinions, but I, who have seen the light, have the truth”. This is why conservatives can come back time and again to discredited ideas like trickle-down economics, the idea that a military build-up is equivalent to safety, and immigrants are unsafe and the cause of both economic stagnation and criminal activity. These are all empirically false ideas, and yet they act like articles of faith, and have a place in intuitionist logic, so they keep coming back.

The force of such intuitionism is that one can think they understand someone better than they understand themselves. I recently had someone explain to me just how little professors worked. In other words, she explained to me, a professor, with no basis other than (I suspect) Fox News, the world I have lived in for 25 years. Why does this make sense? Because she is on the right team, and so her ideas are true, whereas I am not, and therefore everything I think is tainted, in this case, by self-interest. The irony here is that I grew up on that team, and know its playbook – but I’m perceived as the worst kind of person, the apostate who once knew the truth but forsook it.

No evangelical will say that they want a theocracy, but that’s what is happening epistemically. In this approach to politics, conversion is the starting-point of any real progress, and so even if the conversion isn’t literal (and, of course, evangelicals hope that it is), it is conversion to an intuitionist approach to knowledge.

4. Evangelicals are ripe for being fooled and used by politicians, but at the same time those who fool and use them have to adopt their style of reasoning, and are thus eventually brought into the fold. It is a truism of politics that evangelicals vote for someone who they think will advance their positions, and then as soon as that person gets into office they don’t do it. That’s the “swamp” that Trump referred to – the corrupting place that take people away from ideals. The swamp is not “money in politics” or “pork” or anything like that. It’s the worldly influence. And so, Trump has been draining the swamp, by changing bureaucratic offices within Washington to be filled with people who will maintain this belief structure.

5. The epistemology itself is based on propositions, ideas that one must assent to. Evangelical theology is based on giving one’s life to God, which initially means accepting Jesus as one’s personal Saviour. This is done with a prayer, but it also means assenting to a list of propositions about faith and the world. These were initially codified in the pamphlets known as the “Fundamentals” in the early 20th century, and are included in confessions of faith for evangelical churches. These function like creeds functioned in older churches, although they are usually not recited but woven into every assumption of every program and statement in an evangelical church.

The effect of these propositions is to reinforce the internal structure of the evangelical epistemology. There are things like verbal plenary inspiration. Most evangelicals wouldn’t know that term, but they would certainly know the concept, which is that each word of the Bible was given by God and is authoritative and is inspired by God. This is intuitionist – how does one know how things fit together in a book as complex and seemingly contradictory as the Bible? There is the spirit that tells you.

It is important to “not forsake the gathering of yourselves together” – this is called fellowship, but functions as surveillance. It is not felt as surveillance, but it functions that way – any deviation from the spirit of the central propositions is policed.

When one relies on propositions as the containers of truth, it is easy to tell who’s in and who’s out. It is a shibboleth for constructing and policing a tribe, a test to tell whether someone is of the faith or not. There was a time when actions strongly correlated with words, and acting in a way that was interpretable as outside of the tribe was “corrected”. There is redemption, if someone is truly contrite and asks for forgiveness, but there is no redemption for someone outside of the tribe.

These propositions also provide the abstract bedrock for the extrapolations and the tendency toward conformity mentioned earlier. They are the “objective” correlate to the “subjective” inner light.

6. None of this description is something that an evangelical will agree to. But then, that falls in line with intuitionism as well. If argumentation is just a weapon, one way to deploy it is with misdirection. Notice how often both evangelicals and Trumpian politicians will say something that we know is racist, sexist, or otherwise hateful, but which could be interpreted in a banal manner. Everyone knows what is being said, but the one who said it (and his/her defenders) will claim the banal meaning, and accuse others of having their minds in the gutter, or otherwise being inclined to take the worst conclusion. Why? Because in the minds of evangelicals and Trumpians, the opponents are utterly corrupt in every way, and therefore will always take the worst view of those who are holy.

Various philosophers have pointed out that the best practitioners of postmodernism today are evangelicals and Trumpians. That’s probably someone unfair to the idea of the postmodern, but there is a grain of truth, at the tactical level. If all that really matters is intuition, which undergirds who’s on “my” team and who isn’t, then the level of discourse is just a game. The game helps my team to keep score, and in the rare case that someone comes over, especially someone famous, all the better. I remember how excited we all were in the late 70’s when Bob Dylan “became a Christian”. He’s one of us now, we thought. Popularity, especially among the famous and influential, is a mark that we’re right.

7. All of this means that culture is central here. Culture is felt relations and practices. Intuitionism leads to cultural change, not to liberal society in which many cultures come together and the best state emerges out of their engagement with each other.

8. So what is the conclusion here, if you’re not in the evangelical camp, including its political versions? One conclusion is that one cannot argue with an intuitionist. Don’t even try. There are two different games happening, and it is the non-evangelical who usually doesn’t realize that. Secondly, there’s also little point in obsession over what evangelicals are thinking. This comes from the idea that “we don’t understand them well enough”, and more understanding would help to bridge a gap. It won’t. Note that there is never a similar move in the other direction. Evangelicals, both political and religious, are the minority in the country, but there is never an effort on their part to find out how others think in order to convince them of the truth of the evangelical way. That’s not how intuitionism works. Persuasion doesn’t work, in either direction.

What does work? Well, not all evangelicals are hard-core. Some follow a path because those around them do. In other cases (although not all), meeting someone not on their team who is nevertheless a decent person has helped. This does not work on the hard-core, those for whom intuitionism is deeply seated. But what does work is to strip this cult of its success and its honors. Intuitionism needs to be taken seriously, to have people come over to its side, to be unquestionably accepted. That’s easier said than done, given how much of contemporary media takes this intuitionism seriously. But the fact is that evangelicalism’s growth has slowed, and people of color are not joining, and the youth are not staying. And Kansas, which implemented evangelical/intuitionist economics, crashed hard, and evangelical social policy has been shown, almost without exception, to make the problem they are addressing worse (e.g., drugs, abortion, violence, teenage pregnancies, many others). Intuitionism will spin all of this in its own way (the “faithful remnant”, etc.), but this will strip away those who are not hard-core.

There was a long process for many mainline Christians, stretching back through the Middle Ages and further back, of coming to terms with the relationship between faith and reason. This informs and animates the theology and the practice of these other versions of Christianity. The result of the Reformation, and then the Great Awakening as it was experienced in the US, was that this history was largely lost, and with it, the ability to think about what it means for true difference of ideas and opinions to exist in a world where Christians also can exist. If you go into an evangelical bookstore today, you will see almost no history at all. There is a reason for that – intuitionism has no history, and needs no history. It is a cult of easy answers to hard questions, of “me and Jesus” childish faith, and of temper tantrums when this kind of faith is not taken seriously by the rest of the world.

It should be obvious that I think of evangelicalism as a cult, as an aberration of Christianity, not as Christianity itself (despite the claims of evangelicals to be the “true” Christians). That doesn’t mean that every evangelical is a bad person, although intuitionists will inevitably interpret it that way. It means that there are strong head-winds, if you are an evangelical, away from thinking of yourself as part of the epistemic shared world. It’s not impossible to overcome those head-winds, but it isn’t easy. To be evangelical but not intuitionist is very difficult.

We don’t have many events in philosophy, not “EVENTS” at least, you know, those earth-shaking seismic changes in intellectual culture. The October 1966 Johns Hopkins conference that was the... Continue reading...]]>

We don’t have many events in philosophy, not “EVENTS” at least, you know, those earth-shaking seismic changes in intellectual culture. The October 1966 Johns Hopkins conference that was the “French invasion” was an event. This piece, ostensibly about Rene Girard, is a nice account of why it mattered. Peter Caws was there (and mentioned in this piece). For some, this was the beginning of the end; for others, it opened up a huge space for thought. It was supposed to introduce French structuralism to the US while putting a stake through the heart of existentialism, but ended up writing structuralism’s own eulogy. And, it gave us a young unknown thinker named Jacques Derrida. I would have loved to have been there, but then, being only 6 at the time, would probably have only understood Lacan and little else.

28 years ago, I was teaching at Trent University and finishing my Ph.D. In the years before the internet, when you couldn’t just turn on your iPad and get news pushed to you at any time, I had to find out what happened by going in to campus. Just down the road, in Montreal, a man (whose name I will not speak, even though I remember it and can’t forget it) separated out women who were studying engineering, and killed them just because they were women studying engineering. The link between misogyny and murder was made explicit. Feminism, he said in a tortured bit of logic, had ruined his life.

I’ve said this before on FB, but I remember going in to my philosophy of religion class the next morning. I hardly said a word, and half the women in the class burst into tears. Now, in the US, a killing like this just means that it’s Wednesday. Now the NRA has media strategies and talking points in advance for dealing with the inevitability of mass murders. And they’re the relatively reasonable ones, believe it or not, compared to the ones like Alex Jones who claim that mass murders were just actors hired to create a media scene, and no one was actually killed at all.

It remains the case in the US that the vast majority of mass killings are done by white men. And it also remains the case that some of the strongest correlations with this sort of thing, are violence against women and violence against animals. Correlation is not causation, but it is also not nothing. It should be an invitation, or rather a demand, to investigate further. But that investigation would run directly into the cherished beliefs of a society that wants to hold on to the idea that white men really are properly the actors and the deciders and the initiators of everything.

Time’s Person of the Year this year is “The Silence Breakers”. Trump turned down the honor in advance, but in fact, he hovers over it anyway. Like the Montreal killer in 1989, he’s the mediocre white male who is threatened by demands for respect. Let’s not even say equality – he was far from that discussion – let’s just say respect. Even that is too much for him and those like him who torture logic to justify themselves. There is a tidal wave of me-too statements that tell us that this happens to the majority of women. It keeps women in their place, just as the rhetoric of slave owners and Jim Crow enforcers kept blacks in their place in the US. And when words fail, when people start saying me-too, when demands for basic respect are labelled as “political correctness”, which is then seen as equivalent to rugged individualism and thinking for yourself rather than the superficial me-tooism of the mediocre white male, marches happen, women are run over, lined up against walls. Or just shot while shopping, or going to a concert, or living life.

That guy in Montreal in 1989 was a shock to the system at the time. It changed a lot in Canada. In countries other than the US, horrific events like this had an effect on public policy. There was a line that had been crossed, and people rose up and said, never again do we want this to happen. Canada passed gun laws. Australia did the same after a massacre there. In the US, it is clear that there is no line that is a line too far.

I guess today all I can do is to think back to that day in 1989 that I walked into class, and people felt something, not because they were directly involved but because this happened in their country, not far down the road, and it was an attack on all of us because it was an attack on those 14 women. We felt something. Today, in the US, we feel nothing, and so, we do nothing.

Who is this Cathy O’Neil person and how is it possible that she is this clued out? “Where’s academia when it comes to helping us make sense of this?” Um,... Continue reading...]]>

From Nov. 14, 2017

Who is this Cathy O’Neil person and how is it possible that she is this clued out? “Where’s academia when it comes to helping us make sense of this?” Um, all over it, for decades now? With tons of publications, graduate programs, theoretical approaches, and every other thing you could imagine?

Let’s ask another question: why do people willfully ignore the work that has been done for this long, and act as if we don’t know anything about anything? I retract the question – I think the answers are probably clear. Disciplined reflection on the world around us doesn’t hold a candle to self-interested arguments.

One of my favorite lines: “There is essentially no distinct field of academic study that takes seriously the responsibility of understanding and critiquing the role of technology — and specifically, the algorithms that are responsible for so many decisions — in our lives.” Well, no, not true, not even a bit. We have a Ph.D. program that does that at UCF. We’re not the only ones. It is interdisciplinary, yes, because studying complex problems in society has to be. So, there’s no discipline called “Figuring Out the Social Impact of Technology”. But there are loads of interdisciplinary programs, going back to the 70’s.

Yeah, we know lots. We don’t know everything, but we know lots. And some of it is written in highly accessible language, too. There’s no excuse for a data scientist like O’Neil, or for that matter a politician or someone generally interested in these things, to be unaware of this.

Some specifics in this article about a report on womens’ experience in universities. Some of the comments add to the discussion, for a change, rather than being the usual cesspool of uninformed and uncharitable opinion.

One thing that strikes me about this report is how far universities are behind some corporations in figuring out how to make life bearable for their employees. This might be because of the historically conservative nature of university bureaucracies, and their rootedness in a quasi-religious “mission” of education. Women bear the brunt of this, because the conservative and quasi-religious character of universities never included them in the first place. There is also a growth of service requirement that comes with the growth of administration – more administrators do not mean less work for faculty, but more work, since each office must justify its mission, and that requires input from those who bear the primary mission of the university, the faculty. Women (as well as non-whites) bear the brunt of this, in part because of the requirement of diversity. So, as this report says, the combination of historical patterns of family care, along with heavy service loads, means a disproportional weight on women.

I’m struck by this as someone who was on almost 20 committees last year (not including student thesis committees, of which there were several), and who was doing all sorts of stuff over and above a standard faculty load. I know it is worse for some women. More importantly, I know it’s worse because contributions are weighted differently. A task that might count as research in one place counts as service in another, for someone else. Women who have a high sense of quality are told that they “make things harder than they need to be” by striving for that quality.

So there’s no win here – either do something good (and it’s all on your back, but if it succeeds the university will be happy to take credit for it and proclaim loudly how much it supported you the whole time, even if it didn’t), or you try to balance your life, don’t do something as good as possible, and are regarded by others as a slacker, as mediocre, as deadwood. You have time that you can arrange yourself, for the most part – but then people assume you’re “off” when you’re at home or when the university is not in session. I’m not sure why it is so hard to understand that a faculty member does not get paid in the summer, and therefore shouldn’t be working, but in fact usually is working. Is anyone else expected to work without getting paid? All faculty face this, but it remains worse for women because there are those in the university itself who tend to discount their work.

UC Irvine’s response to this is disheartening. They point to all the strides they have taken. That’s fine, but the point here is the experience of the people in the system, not the administrative moves that have been made. Some administrators operate like some politicians – they regard themselves as the reasonable people, in place to govern a system rationally, and they regard all other people as having interests that taint their reasonability. And so, faculty are self-interested, which means they shouldn’t really be listened to, or if they are listened to, the listening is done to try to confirm already decided upon courses of action or intuitions. For both administrators and politicians, the system is basically sound, and just needs a few tweaks at the edges. The message from faculty (and from constituents, to the politicians) is that the system bears the marks of all its past injustices. It carries them forward, unquestioned, because they are part of the background assumptions of things. If women raise issues in the university, the background for their experience is a university built around the work of men, in which women are necessarily oddballs, interlopers, foreigners. The history remains with us, and those who are furthest from the structures that history gave us are the most likely to feel its alienating effects.

Problems with Haidt, and against affirmative action for conservatives in higher education. The categories of “left” and “right” are often not all that helpful, and especially in university settings.... Continue reading...]]>

Problems with Haidt, and against affirmative action for conservatives in higher education. The categories of “left” and “right” are often not all that helpful, and especially in university settings. There is a political reason for some conservative pundits to excoriate the left in universities, and depict them as hotbeds of communist radicalism, but this rarely lines up with the reality of the university.

I’ve sometimes argued in the past that what gets understood by the world in general as left-wing thinking in universities is actually just nuance. This article essentially makes that point as well, when it discusses the study of criminal justice. It’s easy to have a “tough on crime” reductionist attitude, but when you start looking at lowering things like recidivism, overall crime rates, etc., the attitude of revenge/retribution by itself starts looking less effective than other approaches that include mental health care, support for people after they’ve left prison, more humane prison standards, etc.

Reductionism or lack of nuance is not solely a property of the right, of course, and this article mentions that too. I’m often amazed at the ways that changes in economies are imagined that seem completely unworkable or unthought out. And, as I said earlier, the “right” is not a very helpful term, partly because it gathers many things under its umbrella that fit uneasily together, at best. In other words, some who identify as right-wing aren’t afraid of nuance.

But there is, often, a moral framework that precedes rather than follows investigation. Is this true on the left too? Maybe. Certainly those on the right would say there is. But we’re talking about the university here, not general public discourse, where tribal stories are often constructed and spread around to reinforce group identity and cohesion.

In universities, one would hope that one’s assumptions could be tested and questioned. And the fact is, that is usually what happens. Does that mean that people radically change their views on things overnight? Of course not. That doesn’t happen in science either. When you have a body of evidence and argument for something, it takes a lot to change that. But the point is, you subject yourself to that process of evidence and argumentation.

And, the more you’re willing to subject yourself to that process, the more nuanced your ideas are likely to become. And, as I said earlier, the more nuanced your ideas are, the less likely they are to look like any version of ideas that starts from the conclusion, that is, that starts from the belief in a particular kind of worldview and then goes looking for proof for it. So, those who argue for intelligent design, for instance, rarely are able to look past the desired outcome. This extends to framing those who don’t agree in terms of that kind of logic – everyone is working toward their own desired outcome, theirs is just the right one because it came from God. What isn’t understood here is that those who start from actual evidence and argumentation aren’t starting from that logic at all. It is rhetorically possible but philosophically unproductive, and training in science means being rigorous.

I know the response to this on the part of those on the right. How insulting, how elitist, you’re not taking my opinions seriously. And yet, the university takes these things totally seriously. If there’s evidence, if there’s an argument to be made, it’s probably showing up in peoples’ classes. Not every class – a biology class is not going to spend much time on creationist arguments. Why not? Because more often than not, these are presented as opinions, not as positions based on evidence.

We go back to a very old struggle, dating back through the modern period, through the European Middle Ages, back to ancient Greece – the struggle between faith and reason, with a generous side helping of the problem of freedom and determinism. It never entirely goes away, for people on either side of the divide. One can say that nothing but reason matters – and yet we have loads of cognitive evidence that our decisions precede our reasoning abilities, that our groups affect our positions on things, that we cluster together in tribes and adopt the positions of those closest to us rather than those further away. Is that faith? Of course not, but it is the non-rational.

Are we only that, though? Again, of course not. We have the ability to be reflexive, to take a longer view of things. We can put a set of influences in our own paths that enable some outcomes and discourage others (I’m looking at you, bag of Halloween candy…).

To the extent that conservative academics come with what universities do well, which is find evidence for things and make arguments, there is plenty of room in the university, and there are, indeed, those conservatives around. To the extent that we think about “conservative” in the wider public sense, as someone who comes with a set of beliefs about the necessary order of society, the nature of goodness, character, etc., who rely on the representation of a particular opinion as the litmus test for whether conservatives are welcome, to that extent I’m not interested. I’m not interested because that’s not just difference, that’s a rejection of some of the foundational principles of the university, that evidence matters.

Lots more to be said on this, of course. All sides in this kind of debate will see themselves as the open-minded, reasonable ones and see the other side as the closed-minded dogmatic ones. There have been times when the gulf between those sides was less than it is now, and when people of truly different positions could productively talk to each other. I often wish for those days again (and, I’ve been in places where that happened). Those days may come back. But right now, the tribalism runs deep, and is a zero-sum game. In any skirmish, my loss means your win and my win means your loss. It doesn’t need to be like that, all the time.

]]>https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/1023/feed/0Interview with John King – Living in an Age of Trumphttps://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/interview-with-john-king-living-in-an-age-of-trump/
https://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/interview-with-john-king-living-in-an-age-of-trump/#respondWed, 08 Nov 2017 03:34:09 +0000http://faculty.cah.ucf.edu/bbjanz/?p=1021From Nov. 8, 2017